How AI Is Changing Everyday Life in India, From Farm Advice to TB Screening

The chatbot relies on Bhashini, the government's language-AI platform, for translation. That matters because many farmers are more comfortable speaking than typing, and in their own language rather than English or Hindi.

Behind the scenes, the Digital Agriculture Mission is building data foundations, with more than 7.6 crore farmer IDs created, that future AI advisory tools are meant to use.

Health: reading chest X-rays for TB

India has the world's largest tuberculosis burden, and finding cases early is one of the biggest challenges. Here AI has moved from pilot to programme.

The Indian Council of Medical Research developed DeepCXR, an AI tool that sorts chest X-rays into normal and abnormal and flags possible TB. In March 2025 the government told Parliament that the National TB Elimination Programme had adopted it, free of cost to the government, and deployed it in eight states and union territories.

Crucially, the AI does not diagnose. In a large screening study in Delhi's settlements using a commercial AI tool, more than 18,000 people were flagged for further testing, and 877 TB cases were confirmed through laboratory tests of sputum samples. The AI decides who should be tested next; doctors and laboratories confirm the disease.

Language: making services understandable

Bhashini, launched in 2022 under the National Language Translation Mission, provides speech recognition, translation, text-to-speech and other tools through open interfaces. Government departments and states use it to offer services in multiple languages. It is digital public infrastructure: built once, used by many.

Money and customer service

If you have chatted with your bank's virtual assistant, or had a suspicious card transaction blocked within seconds, you have met AI. Banks and payment companies use machine learning to spot unusual patterns that suggest fraud, and to route customer questions. These systems are widely deployed but rarely visible, and their accuracy depends on good data and human oversight.

What is still emerging

Not everything announced is working at scale yet. Treat these as possibilities rather than everyday reality:

• AI tutors for every student in every Indian language;
• AI doctors' assistants in primary health centres;
• fully automated traffic management in cities.

Pilots exist in each of these areas, but evidence on outcomes and costs is still being gathered.

What this means for you

AI is most useful in India where it removes a bottleneck: too few radiologists, too many languages, too many questions for a call centre. It works best alongside people, not in place of them. When you use a government or bank chatbot, keep the human escalation route in mind and keep records of any important answer.

For how these systems work underneath, read Can AI really think?, and for the next step in automation, AI agents explained.