A parliamentary panel reviewing the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology's (MeitY) budget has flagged persistent underutilisation of funds and implementation delays across several major technology schemes.
The committee noted that the ministry attributed the delays to the mission being in its early stages of implementation.
However, the panel expressed concerns about the development of a sovereign AI model, citing high hardware costs, global supply chain delays, and significant power and water consumption by data centres.
The India AI Mission, approved in March 2024, has made 38,000 GPUs accessible to academicians and startups at a subsidised rate, but the government is expected to increase the compute capacity to 100,000 GPUs by the end of 2026.
The committee also noted India's 'abysmal' expenditure of 0.64% of its GDP on research and development, which is below the global average.
The panel examined other schemes, including the Modified Programme for Development of Semiconductors and Display Manufacturing Ecosystem in India, which has seen slower-than-expected utilisation of funds due to the complexity of semiconductor projects.
