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
