AI Takes Centre Stage in India’s Budget 2025-26

India had high hopes for the Union Budget 2025-26, especially after the Chinese DeepSeek model took the world by storm, fuelling India’s AI ambitions – and it did not disappoint.

Given the buzz generated by the IndiaAI mission last week, with the Centre calling for proposals to build India’s own foundational model, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman allocated ₹2,000 crore for the IndiaAI mission – nearly a fifth of the scheme’s ₹10,370 crore announced last year. This funding comes amid the government’s selection of 10 companies to supply nearly 19,000 GPUs for setting up AI data centres and building foundational models.

Before we dive into the Budget, let’s look at some of the top stories of the week.

Is OCR becoming obsolete? With AI models now capable of extracting text from images with high accuracy, the role of traditional OCR is under scrutiny. While startups are shifting towards AI-driven text recognition, OCR remains crucial for digitising Indic languages. But for how long? Read more here.