The Standing Committee chaired by BJP MP, Nishikant Dubey on the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has recommended that the allocated funds are distributed properly and used judiciously so as to make India world’s production centre of semiconductors and a leader in artificial intelligence (AI).
The Committee noted that National Informatics Centre (NIC) under MeitY should have adequate funds to support emerging technologies and sufficient human resources to strengthen our cyber system so as to ward off cyber security threats.
Therefore, it suggested that the funds allocated to NIC may be reviewed periodically and additional need of fund, if any, taken up timely with the Ministry of Finance so that IndiaAI Mission under its ambit becomes a successful mission.
The funds allocated to NIC have been slashed to ₹1,600 crore in 2025-26 from ₹1,748.64 crore in 2024-25, a decrease of nearly ₹149 crore, the Committee stated in its latest report on demands for grants for 2025-26.
To a query on how to achieve the targets with a significantly reduced budgetary allocation, MeitY said, “NIC will achieve its mandate of e-Governance ICT Infrastructure with the allocated budget of ₹1,600 crore during the FY 2025-26. Since the funds allocated to NIC are mainly for establishment related expenses, any shortfall in budget requirements would be considered at RE stage.”
Budgetary support
Overall, the proposed budgetary support for MeitY for the year 2024-25 was ₹25,641.75 crore and the amount allocated at budgetary estimates (BE) stage was ₹21,936.90 crore and the same was reduced to ₹17,566.31 crore at revised estimates (RE) stage. The actual utilisation was ₹8,744.23 crore as on January 31 this year. During 2025-26, the proposed budgetary support was ₹28,223.78 crore and the amount allocated at BE stage was ₹26,026.25 crore. There has been a steep reduction in utilisation with respect to BE (39.86 per cent) during 2024-25, it said.
Noting that even though there was under-utilisation of funds during 2024-25; the Ministry had increased the BE from an RE of ₹17,566 crore in 2024-25 to ₹26,026.25 crore for 2025-26 and in this regard, the Committee sought reasons for seeking an increased allocation despite under-utilisation of funds.
To this, MeitY replied that the reasons for both underutilisation of funds during FY 2024-25 and increased allocation in FY 2025-26 are three important schemes of MeitY, — ‘Production Linked Incentive Scheme (PLI)’, ‘Modified Programme for Development of Semiconductors and Display Ecosystem in India’ and ‘IndiaAI Mission’.
“In both PLI and Semiconductor schemes, expenditure/disbursement of incentives is dependent upon what the private companies are able to deliver. So, it is beyond the control of the Ministry. However, based on the estimated claims Ministry is likely to receive during FY 2025-26 under PLI scheme, status of approved projects under semiconductor scheme and progress made under IndiaAI Mission, the allocation under these schemes have been substantially increased,” it noted.
Meanwhile, the Committee also recommended that AI Safety Institute’s (AISI’s) five safety projects such as real-time deep fake detection, AI-generated content water-marking, ethical AI frameworks and red teaming AI models should be adopted without any further delay.
It also suggested that projects like machine unlearning, synthetic data generation for bias mitigation, AI bias mitigation in healthcare systems and AI algorithm audition tools should be developed as early as possible in consultation with all the stakeholders.
