India’s Ministry of Electronics and IT has a framework called DEPA for AI Training, The Register reports. As the government’s Principal Scientific Adviser put it, “the model travels to the data, rather than the data travelling to the model.”
How it would work
- “Training Data Providers” like hospitals, banks and agencies share anonymized, encrypted data with a “Data Exchange Platform”
- Model builders train inside “hardware-based Secure Data Environments” where data stays encrypted and isolated even during processing
- Data owners set the rules, differential privacy is applied, and everything is logged for audit
The goal is models trained on Indian data for Indian problems, with data owners staying in control. It’s not clear how much work is left to make it real.
My take
I like the principle: keep data where it lives and bring compute to it. It’s the same instinct behind local AI. The hard part will be trusting the enclaves and the audit logs.
God Bless, and May the Source Be with You!
