



Mint Explainer | AI mentioned 11 times, but budget cut: Decoding India's evolving stance on artificial intelligence
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. On 29 January, the 2026 Economic Survey flagged the need for India to take a cautious approach in developing artificial intelligence. On Sunday, the outlay proposed for the India AI Mission in the Union Budget was halved.
This comes days before the Centre hosts the who’s-who of AI at a summit this month. With these mixed signals, the question that arises is whether India is no longer bullish on AI. Mint answers.
Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman mentioned AI in her speech 11 times in total, which is decidedly more than before. AI was mentioned in connection with offering public services, assessing its impact on jobs and skills, a multilingual tool for agricultural information-based services, use by customs agencies for scanning, embedding in school curricula, and the creation of a job portal for the masses. Yet there was no sweeping AI investment directive akin to moves by the US and China—making it a measured, pragmatic announcement of AI.
Last January, India took note of China’s DeepSeek—an AI model that forced the US to innovate on the use of low-cost compute and efficient data centres. India said at the time that the country would see its own ‘DeepSeek moment’ by end-2025. Since then, India’s stance has changed: the Economic Survey said India must not scale AI blindly, but instead focus on sector-wise, business-specific AI development.
On 30 January, union IT minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said most AI use-cases can be served by small language models and not compute- and cost-intensive large ones, reflecting a change in spirit. In the FY26 budget announced on 1 February last year, the finance ministry earmarked ₹2,000 crore for the India AI Mission. This year, the proposed allocation
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