AI Can Empower India’s Farmers, Says World Bank Chief Ajay Banga

WASHINGTON, DC- Artificial intelligence could transform the lives of farmers and other workers in India and other developing countries without posing the same immediate threat to jobs seen in advanced economies, World Bank President Ajay Banga has said, citing an AI initiative helping women farmers in Uttar Pradesh diagnose crop diseases using basic mobile phones.

Banga said the debate over AI in developed countries is dominated by large language models and generative AI, technologies that require enormous computing power, energy, data, skilled personnel and capital.

Most emerging economies, he said, do not yet have that combination.

Instead, Banga sees a potentially transformative opportunity in what he called “small AI” — predictive tools that can improve agricultural productivity, education, skills and healthcare.

Speaking during a discussion at Columbia University moderated by CNN journalist Fareed Zakaria, Banga pointed to Uttar Pradesh as an example of how such technology is already being used.

“So in Uttar Pradesh, in India, we’ve launched applications with Google, for example, where illiterate women farmers connected to a cooperative,” Banga said.

He described how the technology allows a woman farmer to use a basic mobile phone to identify crop diseases and obtain recommendations without needing sophisticated equipment or technical expertise.

“So, we give them a tool that she can speak into a 3G phone, point the camera at the back of a leaf of a diseased plant, and it spits back at you that disease, this insecticide for 25 Rupees from your local cooperative. You press the button. It’s yours.”

“Now, you sort of have democratized the access to amazing knowledge for an illiterate woman farmer. And that to me is, again, A.I. at work,” Banga said.

He said similar opportunities existed in healthcare and other sectors, arguing that the immediate impact of AI would vary significantly between rich and developing economies.

Banga said as many as one-third of jobs in developed economies could potentially be affected by large language models, while the potential impact would be much smaller in middle-income and low-income countries.

Banga said large language models require five critical ingredients that remain scarce in many emerging markets: computing power, energy, data, skilled personnel and capital.

“So I mean, large language models and gen AI is what tends to be discussed in the developed world. And the reality is for the emerging markets, what does LLM actually need to run? It needs computing power. Lots of it. It needs energy. A very large amount of it, which I would argue even the developed world is struggling with.”

“It needs data. It needs people who know how to manage that. And then it needs capital. There are very few emerging markets with that combination of five things,” he said.

That, Banga said, creates an immediate opportunity for emerging economies to deploy smaller AI applications aimed at improving productivity.

The discussion also highlighted the contrast with advanced economies, where AI could disrupt established career paths and white-collar employment.

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who appeared alongside Banga, pointed to professions such as law, where AI can increasingly perform research and document work traditionally assigned to younger employees.

Mitsotakis warned that middle-class workers in developed countries could face pressure from both AI and robotics. (IANS)