Maharashtra To Roll Out AI Policy 2025 Soon, Forms Panel To Submit Recommendations

The Maharashtra government has formed a 16-member committee to submit recommendations on the AI policy 2025, Minister for Information Technology Ashish Shelar said on Friday.

"Pleased to announce the formation of AI Policy Taskforce by my IT Ministry, to help Maharashtra to develop AI Policy 2025 to capitalise on the rapid growth of AI based industry (sic)," Shelar posted on X.

The panel will be required to submit its recommendations within a stipulated time frame.

Maharashtra will become the first state in the country to have a dedicated policy on artificial intelligence. The state government sees AI as a crucial component in the state's digital economy, whose size is estimated at Rs 6 lakh crore, according to the minister.

"Our AI policy will seek to help catalyse this growth further and propel Maharashtra towards its goal of achieving $1 trillion GDP in coming years," Shelar tweeted.

Maharashtra's AI policy will build upon the framework of the central government's IndiaAI Mission Policy, which received the Union Cabinet's nod in March last year with a budgetary outlay of Rs 10,372 crore.

The IndiaAI mission was aimed at establishing a comprehensive ecosystem to catalyse AI innovation through strategic programmes across the public and private sectors. The ecosystem will comprise AI compute infrastructure of 10,000 or more graphics processing units, an official release had stated last year.

According to Shelar, Maharashtra's AI policy will complement the central government's AI mission work by combining it with the state's "leading entrepreneurial energy and dynamism".

AI can also be one of the focus areas of the upcoming Union Budget for fiscal 2026. The budget can entail provisions for a push towards this rapidly emerging technology, people with knowledge of the matter had told NDTV Profit.

A special policy package for AI is in the works, they said on Monday, while adding that the focus will be on AI-skilling schemes along with AI centres.