In a recent podcast with Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla said India could offer core public services like education, healthcare, and legal advice for less than a dollar a month per person using AI. He pointed to government policy as a key factor in making this possible.
“Government policy will have a lot more to do with these things than people realise today,” Khosla said. “If I were PM Modi, I’d be doing everything I can to get those as common services.”
Drawing parallels with existing infrastructure like Aadhaar and UPI, he said AI could take this further. “As part of Aadhaar today, we have UPI, which takes away the need for Visa and Mastercard,” he said, calling the 3% transaction fee a tax that Indian consumers no longer pay.
Khosla estimated that AI-based public services could cost “a billion dollars a year a month for each of these or 10 billion a year,” calling the cost “so trivial.” He said these services could include “payment services, medical services, and education services.”
According to Khosla, the efficiency of AI makes it comparable to a private enterprise. “Because AI is doing the work, you don’t care about economic efficiency. Your government is as efficient as private enterprise in these services that can be made into AI. And they should be,” he said.
He argued that rural India could gain the most. “If you live in a village, you shouldn’t have to go take a day’s journey to get a basic medical checkup, and the doctor sees you for 5 minutes, and then you spend a day getting back to your village. It just shouldn’t [be].”
Referencing a document he wrote a decade ago, Khosla added, “I wrote about the fact that a village in India will get better cardiac advice, cardiac care than I can get at Stanford because Stanford will still in 15 years have their cardiologists, and in the village there’ll be AI.”
While he admitted that not all services could be free—“Housing will still be a material thing”—he said the government could offer expertise-based services widely. “Personal lawyers for everybody, personal tutors for every child or adult, personal medical care advice,” he listed.
“Half the economy could be covered in almost free services from the government,” he said. “To be honest, I’d love to do that in India. It’s such a no-brainer.” He further added that it should be made available in the next five years.
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