The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) of India is planning to build a Quantum Computing Applications Lab, in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

This collaboration will lead to an increased quantum computing led research, development and scientific discoveries.

This is the first initiative of MeitY in the country to provide scientific, academic and developer communities the access to quantum computing, this will also be the first quantum computing application lab on AWS Cloud to support a science and technology mission of a government at a country level.

“Empowering the scientific community in India with advanced technologies will play a crucial role in enabling India to achieve world-class scientific solutions. The MeitY Quantum Computing Applications Lab established with the support from AWS is a significant step in India’s science and technology journey,” said Ajay Sawhney, Secretary, MeitY.

The lab will start operating in March 2021 and will focus on empowering advances in manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, aerospace engineering and more in order to strengthen the economy. Apart from providing access to Amazon Braket, which helps users to develop and design quantum algorithms, test and troubleshoot them on quantum computers and focus on the innovation. AWS will also provide technical and programmatic support for new quantum computing workloads, the company said.

“AWS is excited to support MeitY in setting up the Quantum Computing Applications Lab, and enable more scientists and developers to access quantum computing and explore the practical applications of quantum algorithms,” said Max Peterson, Vice President, International Sales, Worldwide Public Sector, AWS. Further he also congratulated MeitY for its visionary leadership to empower the scientific community in India.

The lab will identify the quantum computing problem statements for experimentation among the central and state governments, research institutions and academia in India and will work with experts from the government sector to define the statements, make it public and invite applications from researchers, academia and organisations to address them.

The services at the lab will help the government and the scientific body to identify the problems and test them via experiments and prototypes in a low risk environment, the outcomes will help researchers with the development of new applications, models and framework in quantum computing, the company added.