SDG 8: Decent Work & Economic Growth | SDG 9: Industry, Innovation & Infrastructure
Institutions: NITI Aayog | Ministry of Education | Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology
NITI Aayog has unveiled two major strategy documents that together define India’s long-term approach to artificial intelligence:
Roadmap for Job Creation in the AI Economy, and
Roadmap on AI for Inclusive Societal Development.
Rather than treating AI as a purely technological domain, NITI positions it as a structural transformation agenda — one that can generate new forms of employment, deepen productivity, and extend digital empowerment to citizens historically excluded from technology-driven growth.
The Job Creation Roadmap, prepared with NASSCOM and BCG, estimates that AI could generate up to 4 million new jobs by 2030, primarily in technology services, customer-experience, healthcare analytics, and digital infrastructure management. It simultaneously warns of occupational displacement in routine service and quality-assurance roles, calling for a National AI Talent Mission to coordinate skilling, certification, and deployment across sectors. The report emphasises that AI’s job potential depends on widespread AI literacy, lifelong learning systems, and public-private partnerships to scale reskilling.
The companion document — the Roadmap on AI for Inclusive Societal Development — extends this vision beyond the formal workforce to India’s 490 million informal workers. It advocates a persona-based design framework that tailors AI interventions to the realities of farmers, street vendors, gig workers, and home-based labour. Its flagship proposal, the Digital ShramSetu Mission, seeks to bridge India’s digital and social protection divides through vernacular AI tools, micro-credentials, accessible data platforms, and personalised support. The report argues that inclusive AI must begin with trust, language, and usability, ensuring that automation augments human effort rather than replacing it.
Together, the two documents mark a conceptual shift in India’s AI policy: from viewing artificial intelligence as an isolated innovation frontier to embedding it within the broader goals of employment, equity, and digital citizenship. NITI’s framework is explicitly dual-track — growth through innovation, and justice through inclusion — emphasising that India’s AI future must be shaped by its demographic realities and constitutional commitments.
NITI Aayog’s twin roadmaps establish the intellectual and institutional scaffolding for India’s AI decade. The first offers a pathway to industrial competitiveness and employment creation, while the second grounds technology policy in social inclusion and ethical design. Their combined significance lies in framing AI as both an economic multiplier and a public good. This duality is crucial for India, where the benefits of automation risk concentrating in urban formal sectors unless explicitly counterbalanced by inclusive design.
The reports also reinforce NITI’s role as a policy orchestrator — convening ministries, states, industry, and academia into a single ecosystem. By aligning initiatives such as Digital India, Skill India, PM Gati Shakti, and Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI), NITI is creating a policy grammar in which data, compute, and capability are viewed as shared national assets. The approach mirrors global best practice but localises it for India’s scale, multilingual diversity, and informal economy.
What is Digital ShramSetu? → A proposed national mission to connect informal and gig workers to AI-enabled skilling, job-matching, and social-security platforms — integrating frontier technologies with welfare delivery to create a digitally inclusive labour ecosystem.
Follow the full reports here:
Roadmap for Job Creation in the AI Economy – NITI Aayog (2025)
Roadmap on AI for Inclusive Societal Development – NITI Aayog (2025)