New Delhi: The government selected 150 candidates against a target of 5,000 undergraduate fellowships in the first year of the IndiaAI Mission’s flagship scholarship scheme, spent barely a third of the money set aside for the Mission in 2025-26, and saw the marquee programme’s budget for the coming year halved by the Finance Ministry even as it works towards steep compute and model-building goals, according to fresh disclosures made to a parliamentary panel.
The numbers, contained in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s (MeitY) action taken replies, run through the Thirty-First Report of the Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology, headed by BJP MP Nishikant Dubey, which was presented to Lok Sabha and laid in Rajya Sabha on 6 August.
Taken together, the replies expose the gap between the ambitions of the Rs 10,371.92 crore AI Mission, cleared by the Cabinet in March 2024, and its delivery on the ground two years on.
Under the mission’s FutureSkills pillar, fellowships are awarded to undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD scholars to promote AI research. In 2024, the Ministry set a target of 5,000 UG fellowships and selected 150. Against 2,000 PG fellowships, it picked 140. Against 100 PhD fellowships, three scholars came through.
The fellowship gap
In 2025, the Ministry raised the targets—and the selections barely moved. The UG target was revised up to 8,000; 159 were selected. The PG target was raised to 5,000; 101 made it. Only the PhD stream turned a corner, with 199 scholars selected against a target of 167—the single category where the ministry beat its own goal across two years.
MeitY put the shortfall down to visibility. The “comparatively lower number of applications during the initial phase was primarily due to limited awareness among students regarding the IndiaAI Fellowship programme,” it told the panel, adding that IndiaAI had since run webinars, reached out to college deans and faculty, and publicised the scheme through the pre-summit events of the AI Impact Summit 2026. The mission, it said, had “completed only about two years since its approval”.
A third of funds spent
The thin uptake is mirrored in the mission’s accounts. The committee found MeitY had spent just 32 percent of the funds allocated at the revised estimate (RE) stage in 2025-26, as on 31 December 2025, leaving roughly two-thirds unspent with the financial year three-quarters gone. For 2026-27, the Budget sanctioned only half the amount the ministry had proposed.
MeitY defended the slow burn as deliberate, saying it had adopted “a calibrated implementation approach” to align spending with the readiness of individual initiatives and was committed to the “optimal and strategic utilisation of funds”.
The targets it must meet are large: Compute capacity of 10,000 or more GPUs and an AI Marketplace, a further 3,000 GPUs of sovereign AI compute through cloud service providers, foundational models with over 100 billion parameters trained on Indian-language datasets, and AI curation units across 50 line ministries and departments.
The panel, which first flagged these concerns while examining the demands for grants for 2026-27, warned that while the mission was “aggressively working to establish a GPU cluster”, the high cost of hardware, global supply chain delays and the “huge power and water consumption by data centres” were significant issues, and asked the ministry to consult academicians, environmentalists and budget experts.
It also noted that India’s gross expenditure on R&D stands at 0.64 percent of GDP, below the global average per the Economic Survey.
Aadhaar’s Rs 628-crore squeeze
The strain is not confined to the AI Mission. The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which runs Aadhaar, told the committee it had projected expenditure of around Rs 2,900 crore for 2026-27 and sought Rs 1,200 crore from MeitY—but was allocated just Rs 572.41 crore, less than half. The authority conceded the sum “will not be sufficient to meet the requirements of UIDAI” and said it would bridge the gap with its own internal revenue.
UIDAI said it would prioritise high-impact projects, including strengthening enrolment, updation and authentication infrastructure, and listed online verification of legal documents and API integration with the Registrar General of India among its main challenges. It said financial decisions would be “guided by cost-benefit considerations”, that utilisation certificates were submitted quarterly, and that CAG audit reports would be laid before both Houses of Parliament.
Data Board yet to take off; CERT-In short-staffed
Two other threads in the report underline the pattern of allocations outrunning execution. The Data Protection Board of India—the body meant to enforce the Digital Personal Data Protection Act—spent nothing across FY 2024-25 and 2025-26, with its RE staying at Rs 2 crore, even though the DPDP Rules were notified 13 November 2025.
MeitY offered seven reasons for the non-spending, from a “phased implementation approach” to pending cabinet approval for the registrar’s post, arguing the delay was down to “the sequencing of statutory, regulatory, and administrative prerequisites rather than inaction”.
The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), meanwhile, is still staffing up amid a rise in cyberattacks. The Finance Ministry has approved 269 posts, but recruitment rules are being framed and legally vetted; seven vacancies of Scientist ‘B’ have been filled from an earlier drive, action on 133 more is “at advanced stage” and five Scientist ‘F’ posts await competent-authority approval.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)
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