Rajasthan AI/ML Policy, 2026

Rajasthan's Department of Information Technology and Communication (DoIT&C) publishes the state's technology policies and orders, and its policies page lists the 'Rajasthan AI/ML Policy 2026' as the newest policy document, ahead of the Rajasthan AGVC-XR Policy 2024 and Rajasthan Startup Policy 2022.¹ The department's AI initiatives page records the build-up: on 29 October 2025 the Chief Minister, Bhajan Lal Sharma, said the state would introduce an AI policy at the TiE Global Summit in Jaipur in January, and on 18 November 2025 the Digi Fest and TiE Global Summit was expected to launch it.⁴

According to MediaNama, the Cabinet approved the Rajasthan AI/ML Policy 2026 on 30 December 2025, and the Chief Minister launched it together with the state AI portal on 6 January 2026.⁵

The AI portal, run by DoIT&C, describes the policy as a flagship programme with the tagline 'Empowering Citizens & Catalysing Economic Growth'. It sets out three pillars: AI adoption in governance, applying AI to citizen services, e-governance and public administration; AI skilling and capacity building, training students, officials and professionals including through a state AI learning management system; and AI incentives for industries, offering subsidies, incubation and funding for AI research, start-ups and R&D.² The portal says the policy acts as a force multiplier that tops up incentives under the Rajasthan Investment Promotion Scheme 2024, the MSME Policy 2024, the Data Centre Policy 2025 and the Startup Policy 2022, and lists 'Gov-AI Sandbox & GPU Grants', 'Startup Innovation & iStart' and '10,000+ Skilling Fellowships' as strategic elements without further detail.²

MediaNama reports that the policy requires each department to identify AI use cases and appoint an AI nodal officer, and that it promises 'explainable and auditable' AI decision-making and 'secure handling of personal data'.⁵ The portal describes the aim of building an inclusive, ethical and future-ready AI-powered Rajasthan, but lists no budget figure or amounts of subsidy.²

The portal's AI start-ups page lists 12 Rajasthan-linked start-ups, among them an agri-tech computer-vision firm that grades produce from photographs, a Jaipur ed-tech platform, and a firm describing itself as working on responsible AI, tagged with 'Golden', 'Silver' or 'Rajasthan Cohort' labels that the page does not explain.³ It says start-ups register through the iStart Rajasthan single-window portal, and that DoIT&C AI recognition unlocks fast-tracked procurement, grants and incubation access and lets qualified start-ups pilot solutions with departments such as Health, Agriculture and Urban Development. It reports Rs 10.79 crore distributed to 333 start-ups under iStart and state schemes, a network of more than 100 investors, and nine incubation locations anchored by Techno Hub Jaipur (100,000 square feet).³ The page does not describe eligibility criteria, the Gov-AI sandbox or GPU grants, so those parts of the policy remain unspecified in the sources reviewed here.

The AI portal. The state's AI portal, ai.rajasthan.gov.in, includes the learning management system, an AI sandbox and the 'Ask Raj GenAI' chatbot. The launch on 6 January 2026 was accompanied by a memorandum of understanding with Google, IIT Delhi, National Law University Jodhpur and the Wadhwani Foundation.⁵

Government AI uses. The DoIT&C AI initiatives page, a dated feed of the department's announcements, reports uses of AI in state administration, among them:⁴

• an AI facial-recognition system to trace missing persons, using a database of about 8 crore residents' photographs and aiming to match faces within three hours (25 March 2026);
• AI-based competency assessment of about 25.87 lakh students in classes 3, 4, 6 and 7 across 41 districts, from 14 March 2026;
• AI-based pensioner verification and disbursement with face recognition through a mobile app (10 February 2026), and facial authentication for MGNREGA job-card holders in Kota (3 October 2025);
• an AI-driven IAS/RAS transfer and posting platform, RajKosh 2.0, costing Rs 346 lakh;
• AI surveillance and a live command centre covering 887 REET D.El.Ed 2026 examination centres, and AI monitoring of 190 bank branches and ATMs to curb cybercrime.

These entries are the department's own descriptions. The page does not set out the legal basis, data protection safeguards or error rates for the face-recognition uses, and this entry has not verified the figures independently.

The main published scrutiny so far concerns the portal's handling of data and the meaning of 'sovereign' AI. In an analysis of 29 September 2026, MediaNama read the portal's privacy policy, about 250 words long, which lists four categories of data (identity, contact, technical and usage), says the portal is hosted on secure servers within India in compliance with MeitY guidelines, and names a nodal officer. It gives no retention periods, no disclosures about sharing with third parties and no grievance officer, and does not mention the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. The terms of service bar misuse of the sandbox for 'harmful, biased, or malicious content', but neither document says which AI model powers the sandbox or chatbot, who operates it, or where prompts and outputs go.⁵

MediaNama's central point is that 'within India' describes where data is stored, not who controls it, and that the January 2026 MoU with Google, IIT Delhi, NLU Jodhpur and the Wadhwani Foundation does not say whether Google infrastructure or models support the portal. The analysis also noted that the pages showed a 'last updated' date that changed from day to day, suggesting it was generated when the page loaded rather than recorded when the text changed.⁵

The face-recognition uses reported on the department's page raise questions about consent, accuracy and legal basis. This entry could not assess them, because the page describes the systems only briefly and the full policy text was not read.⁴

As of 15 October 2026 the Rajasthan AI/ML Policy 2026 is the state's operative AI policy and is posted on the DoIT&C policies page.¹ I could not read the full policy PDF, which exceeds the size limit of the fetch tool used for this research, so details such as budget, institutional bodies and the amount of each incentive are not given here. Later amendments, financial outlays or implementation reports after the 29 September 2026 MediaNama analysis were not found. Readers should consult the policy document at the DoIT&C site for its exact provisions.⁶