Meet man, IIT graduate, who later became IAS officer after cracking UPSC exam, he is now leading India's top...

Abhishek Singh is a classic example of a young and poor boy working hard his whole life and turning out to be one of the biggest names in the AI industry. He is a 1995-batch IAS officer who took every opportunity on his way and became a leader of digital transformation and technological innovation in India. The base for such excellence was in the making when Singh started his journey at IIT Kanpur from where he completed B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering in 1992. His command over technological domain led him to lead the IndiaAI mission but long before that his determination and hard work led him to crack UPSC which made him an IAS officer. His educational choices, passion for contributing in governance and a vision to bring a revolution in AI has made him what he is today. 

Journey after becoming IAS officer

Abhishek Singh's interest in policy and governance made him pursue Master’s in Public Administration which he did from Harvard’s Kennedy School in 2013. He later pursued UPSC exam and cleared it with a good rank. He was posted as  Principal Secretary and Home Commissioner, in Nagaland, with a responsibility to manage law-and-order and urban development. In his career in governance, Singh was posted in Uttar Pradesh and Nagaland and carried out works in local development, law and order, disaster management, and implementation of welfare programmes. 

From 2014 to 2017 he worked in the Food Corporation of India where he came up with several IT and engineering solutions to enhance storage and distribution. From 2019 Abhishek Singh headed the National e-Governance Division under which he drove innovation in various public digital platforms like CoWIN, DIKSHA, DigiLocker, MyGov, and Karmayogi Bharat. Because of his breakthrough innovations through in many government linked digital and AI websites and applications, he was honoured with the UNDP Future of Government Leadership Award in 2024. 

He was an architect of the digital public infrastructure which can be accessed by hundreds of millions of Indians. 

Abhishek Singh is currently working as Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology where he is the head of India’s AI & Emerging Technologies, Cybersecurity, and Digital Skilling initiatives. He has been a part of Digital India from a good number of years during which he successfully secured  approvals for the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) chair which India took over in November 2022. 

He leads the USD 1.2 billion five-year IndiaAI Mission which was launched in 2024 in which he allocated 10,000 GPUs for foundational model development which aimed at surpassing the top ranked tech giants.