AHMEDABAD: Gujarat Finance Minister Kanu Desai unveiled a record Rs 4,08,053 crore Budget for 2026-27 in the Assembly at Gandhinagar and declared 2026 as Gujarat Tourism Year.
The Budget pushes AI-driven policing, Olympics-ready sports infrastructure, mass bus expansion, police housing, and major investments in tourism hubs, highways and health coverage.
This is Gujarat’s biggest-ever budget, that instantly rewrites the State’s spending scale and policy priorities.
With a massive Rs 4,08,053 crore outlay, and being his fifth consecutive budget, the minister framed the roadmap on five interlocked pillars: social security, human resource development, infrastructure, economic expansion and green growth, setting the tone for an aggressive growth decade.
The scale of the Budget was matched by its strategic pivot, with the government simultaneously declaring 2026 as Gujarat Tourism Year, signalling a decisive push to convert culture, pilgrimage and leisure into a high-growth economic engine.
Consequently, a combined Rs 5,096 crore allocation was earmarked for tourism, pilgrimage, civil aviation and sports, a move designed to energise travel circuits while boosting local employment and allied industries.
The tourism thrust flowed seamlessly into infrastructure-heavy announcements, as the government proposed Rs 447 crore for a world-class bus port at Somnath, aiming to transform the sacred town into a global destination while enhancing visitor mobility and service capacity.
Parallelly, historic sites like Lothal and Dholavira linked to the Indus Valley Civilisation were positioned as global tourist magnets, tying heritage conservation directly to economic expansion.
The tourism narrative further strengthened with Rs 236 crore earmarked to upgrade facilities around the iconic Statue of Unity, where rising tourist footfall has already accelerated growth in transport, hospitality and handicrafts while generating sustained jobs for tribal communities in surrounding regions.
Thus, tourism investments were strategically tied not just to visitor numbers but also to grassroots livelihood creation.
Yet, even as tourism drove visibility, technology drove governance reform, as the Budget proposed establishing a Data Fusion Centre and Centre of Excellence for AI in Policing for Gujarat Police, backed by Rs 60 crore.
This centre will aggregate, process and analyse critical policing data in real time, signalling a decisive shift towards predictive, intelligence-led law enforcement across the State.
The policing push did not stop at technology alone, because the government also unveiled a five-year plan to construct 20,444 modern residential houses for police personnel, backed by a Rs 1,571 crore provision, thereby linking welfare with operational efficiency and strengthening the backbone of law and order machinery.
Health security, too, was woven into the fiscal design, as the government announced cashless medical cover up to Rs 10 lakh for about 6.4 lakh state karmayogis and pensioners, aligned with the framework of Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana, expanding financial protection while reducing out-of-pocket medical burdens for government staff families.
Infrastructure expansion then took centre stage, as the Budget proposed the induction of 2,463 new technologically upgraded buses,s including 500 AC electric buses,s alongside 500 mini buses for tribal areas, students and industrial workers, with a total provision of Rs 1,286 crore, thereby synchronising mobility with inclusivity and green transport goals.
Road connectivity was simultaneously elevated to a macro-development level, with about 1,155 km of state roads declared as the ‘Garvi Gujarat High-Speed Corridor’, backed by Rs 800 crore, aimed at accelerating logistics efficiency, employment generation and industrial growth through faster inter-regional linkages.
The sports sector, meanwhile, was positioned as both a prestige and infrastructure project, as the government unveiled plans to transform Ahmedabad into an ‘Olympic Ready City’ ahead of the 2030 Commonwealth Games, with Rs 1,278 crore proposed for international-grade sports complexes, stadiums and modern public transport integration to support global sporting events.
Taken together, the announcements stitched a tightly interlinked fiscal narrative of tourism to jobs, AI policing to security, transport to inclusivity, highways to industrial growth, and sports to global branding.
Ultimately, the Budget was projected not merely as an expenditure statement but as a multi-sector growth blueprint engineered to scale infrastructure, governance and global visibility in one sweeping policy arc.