Bhubaneswar: State cabinet has approved the Odisha Artificial Intelligence Policy (2025), a pivotal step in the state’s digital transformation journey.
Chief Secretary Manoj Ahuja breiefed Media after the Cabinet Meeting. This policy aims to leverage AI’s transformative power to enhance governance, foster innovation, improve data-driven policymaking, and drive inclusive socio-economic development. By promoting the responsible, secure, and scalable adoption of AI technologies, Odisha seeks to embed AI across various sectors.
The Policy is built upon four foundational pillars: AI infrastructure, skills development, energy considerations, and robust regulatory frameworks. It provides a strategic blueprint for establishing high-end computing capacity, facilitating access to extensive, open datasets, strengthening industry-academia collaboration, and ensuring the deployment of sustainable and green AI solutions.
A significant feature of the Policy is the establishment of the Odisha AI Mission. This dedicated apex institution will be responsible for implementing AI initiatives across government departments, developing use cases, coordinating pilot projects, and offering support to public agencies, startups, and academic institutions. The Mission will operate under a two-tiered governance structure: a high-level AI Taskforce and an AI Cell, which will be housed at the Odisha Computer Application Centre (OCAC). This structure is designed to accelerate cross-sectoral AI adoption, facilitate pilot projects, and drive use-case development.
The Policy identifies several high-impact AI applications across critical sectors, including healthcare, agriculture, education, climate change and disaster management, and governance. These include AI-assisted disease prediction and screening, smart irrigation and crop diagnostics, multilingual AI tools for personalized education, predictive disaster response systems, and intelligent citizen engagement platforms.
In alignment with global standards, the Policy strongly emphasizes the ethical and responsible deployment of AI. It proposes robust data governance frameworks and institutional mechanisms to mitigate misuse, bias, or harm from AI systems. Furthermore, Odisha is committed to aligning its AI development with national and international best practices for trusted and secure AI.
Through this Policy, Odisha aims to establish itself as a prominent hub for AI-led public innovation, AI startups, and export-ready AI solutions. The official notification of the Policy is expected to catalyze the state’s burgeoning AI ecosystem and strengthen its alignment with the objectives of the IndiaAI Mission across critical domains such as compute, skills, datasets, financing, innovation, and AI in governance.