India Constitutes AIGEG to Coordinate AI Policy

On April 13, 2026, MeitY constituted the AI Governance and Economic Group (AIGEG) via an office memorandum, per MediaNama's review of the order and a PIB statement. The AIGEG merges two bodies that had been proposed separately, an AI Governance Group from November 2025's India AI Governance Guidelines and an AI Economic Council from the 2025-26 Economic Survey, into a single apex body. Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw chairs the group, with Minister of State Jitin Prasada as vice chairperson; members include MeitY Secretary S. Krishnan (convener), Principal Scientific Advisor Ajay Kumar Sood, Chief Economic Advisor V. Anantha Nageswaran, NITI Aayog CEO B.V.R. Subrahmanyam, the secretaries of the Departments of Telecommunications, Science and Technology, and Economic Affairs, and a representative of the National Security Council Secretariat. A Technology and Policy Expert Committee (TPEC) will provide advisory support on emerging risks and global developments, per government notices posted on IndiaAI and PIB.

MediaNama's review of the constitution order found AIGEG excludes the independent regulatory bodies the AI Governance Guidelines had recommended folding in, TRAI, the Competition Commission of India, the Data Protection Board, RBI, SEBI, ICMR, and UGC among them, leaving membership limited to ministers and senior bureaucrats from a handful of ministries. The formation follows a consistent government position against direct AI regulation: MeitY Secretary S. Krishnan said in November 2025 that the government was taking a deliberately non-regulatory approach, and Vaishnaw told Parliament in 2023 that India was not considering an AI law. That stance now sits alongside a Parliamentary Standing Committee on Communications and IT recommendation, reported separately, that the government examine a comprehensive AI law.

The AIGEG's stated remit, a labor-impact assessment, a decade-long deployment roadmap, and a deploy/pilot/defer classification system for AI use cases, will shape compliance and procurement priorities if it produces binding output, but the composition matters as much as the mandate: without TRAI, RBI, SEBI, or the Data Protection Board at the table, sector-specific rules on telecom AI, financial AI, or data protection may still be decided elsewhere, and organizations should not assume AIGEG output substitutes for sectoral regulatory engagement.

• •Whether AIGEG's classification of AI use cases into deploy, pilot, or defer categories becomes binding guidance or stays advisory, and whether excluded regulators are consulted before sectoral rules follow.
• •The composition and published output of the Technology and Policy Expert Committee, including named experts and any public risk assessments.
• •Whether the Parliamentary Standing Committee's call for a comprehensive AI law gains traction against MeitY's stated preference for a non-regulatory approach.

Centralizing AI policy in a body chaired by the IT minister while leaving out telecom, competition, data-protection, and financial regulators is consistent with the government's repeatedly stated preference for innovation-first, light-touch AI governance, but it also means AIGEG's authority to bind those regulators' future AI-specific rulemaking is unclear. Readers should treat AIGEG's announced roadmap and classification framework as a coordination mechanism rather than a substitute for sector regulators eventually issuing their own AI rules.