NEW DELHI: The much talked-about 100-day agenda of Prime Minister Narendra Modi after getting re-elected in the general elections later this year will have a distinct focus on making India an innovation hub.
Speaking to this newspaper, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the government wants India to undertake a lot of innovative works. She said the focus of the next government will be to build on the ground work the government has already done on this front. The finance minister in the interim budget had announced a corpus of Rs 1 lakh crore to promote technological innovation in sunrise sectors.
“We want innovation to happen here so that India becomes a leader in anushandhan, and that kind of emphasis being put there,” she said. The minister said India is looking to become a leader in AI. “We have all the wherewithal… we have youngsters who are ready to do it, we’re setting up three centres of excellence,” she said. In the medium term, the government would keep the focus on skilling the youth, she added.
India recently launched a national-level IndiaAI mission with a budget outlay of Rs 10,371.92 crore to boost artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem.
Sitharaman said the target has been set by the PM for India to become a vikshit bharat by 2047, and the work has to be done to achieve that target. “That target has been set and the government has made commitment that it will do everything on the ground – policy and legislative support – that you need to achieve the target,” said the FM. Another immediate focus area of the new
government is to try and sign free trade agreements (FTAs) with many countries ‘with rapidity’, so that the country opens up the market and it is able to grow with favorable trade transactions.