India: Pioneer of Frugal and Inclusive AI
I recently visited Desicrew’s digital solutions centre in TN Palayam, Gobichettipalayam, in the Erode district in Tamil Nadu.
Gobichettipalayam is small rural town of 60,000 people.
It is known as “Mini Kollywood” because many Tamil films were shot here:
But it is now a world-class “Mini IT Hub” pioneering Frugal and Inclusive AI in India.
Let me unpack this for you.
First, a word about Desicrew.
Founded by Saloni Malhotra and incubated at IIT-Madras, Desicrew was launched in 2007 as a Rural BPO company.
As Ashwanth Gnanavelu, co-founder of DesiCrew, explains:
“The underlying idea is to create IT-based employment in rural areas which will offer cost-effective back office solutions to clients. (This) would reduce urban migration with services built on the values of delivering world class quality and cost efficiency”.
Desicrew believes any IT work, however complex it is, can by undertaken by talented people in rural India.
Desicrew aims to synergize tech innovation and poverty eradication and women empowerment.
Desicrew today employs 1000 people — two-thirds are women — in several digital solutions centers located in Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns and villages in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.
J. K. Manivannan, cofounder, told me Desicrew is creating “prosperity hubs” in Tier 2–3 towns by constantly upskilling its rural talent so they can keep on providing high-value, high-end, and high-quality services.
For instance, DISHA (DesiCrew Hub for Intelligent Solutions for Humanizing AI) offers comprehensive Gen AI solution for enterprises that want to develop and scale their own custom LLM model.
DISHA services include multi-modal and multilingual LLM training, annotation, prompt engineering, and model evaluation — all done ethically.
The TN Palayam centre I visited offers LLM support and computer vision services.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, wants to team up with India and leverage its frugal innovation capabilities to develop low-cost AI models that could rival with DeepSeek’s thrifty AI solution.
But Desicrew shows that India, in addition to “owning” Frugal AI, can also pioneer Inclusive AI.
Inclusive AI is not just about democratizing the *USE* of AI by developing LLMs in regional Indian languages.
Truly Inclusive AI is about democratizing the *DEVELOPMENT* of AI by hiring and training rural talent in small towns across India — as DesiCrew does.
This is critically needed in Northern & Northeastern Indian regions that lag South India in interest and adoption of AI.
If it plays its cards well, India can become a world-class pioneer of Frugal *and* Inclusive AI.
