Budget 2025: ₹1700-crore boost to space; duty on rocket, satellite parts abolished 

Although the Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman did not mention ‘space’ in her speech, the Budget has provided a substantial boost to the sector, with a 14.4 per cent hike in total allocations (over revised estimates for 2024-25). The ‘capital’ part of it has got a 30 per cent hike. Alongside, the Budget also proposes to abolish customs duties on ‘ground installations for satellites including its spares and consumables’ from ‘as applicable’ to ‘nil’, and on ‘goods used in the building of launch vehicles and launching of satellites’ from 5 per cent to ‘nil’. 

The total allocation to the space sector goes up to ₹13,416 crore for 2025-26, compared with ₹11,725 crore in the revised estimates for 2024-25. Of this, the allocation to ‘capital expenditure’ goes up from ₹4,728 crore to ₹6,103 crore – a rise of 29 per cent.  

The bulk of this allocation is under the head ‘space technology’ -- from ₹4,172 crore to ₹5,388 crore. ‘Space technology’ includes the activities of the twelve departments of the Indian space agency, ISRO, such as Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Liquid Propulsion Systems Centre, UR Rao Satellite Centre, and Satish Dhawan Space Centre. 

However, in terms of percentage increase in allocations, the sharpest rise has gone to ‘space sciences’, which includes ISRO’s missions like Chandrayaan-III and Small Satellite for Atmospheric Studies and Climate and Atmospheric Program. Capital allocation to ‘space sciences’ has gone up from ₹45 crore to ₹244 crore.  

₹20,000 crore corpus for R&D and innovation 

Typically, schemes with outlays of the order of tens of thousands of crores, are announced in the Budget speeches but the financial allocations are spread over several years. But in this Budget, the Finance Minister made an exception for ‘R&D and Innovation’, allocating all the ₹20,000 crore announced in the Budget in one go. 

As such, the capital allocation to the Department of Science & Technology shows an increase from just ₹73 crore in the revised estimates for 2024-25, to a whopping ₹20,095 crore.  

The ₹20,000 crore is “a corpus to provide long term financing for spurring private sector-driven research, development and innovation,” the Budget documents note. 

Deep Sea Mission gets ₹600 crore 

While the Deep Sea Mission under the Ministry of Earth Sciences has seen no increase in financial allocation for 2025-26 over the previous year, which stands the same at ₹600 crore, the Mission has received more for capital expenditure and less for revenue – keeping the total the same. 

The revised estimates for 2024-25 show revenue expenditure of ₹500 crore and capital expenditure of ₹100 crore, they are ₹300 crore under each head for 2025-26. It is not clear as to why this has been done.  

The Mission, which aims to explore deep-oceanic resources consists of six major themes, namely (i) Development of technologies for deep sea mining, manned submersible, and underwater robotics; (ii) Development of ocean climate change advisory services; (iii) Technological innovations for exploration and conservation of deep sea biodiversity; (iv) Deep ocean survey and exploration; (v) Energy and freshwater from the ocean and (vi) Advanced marine station for ocean biology. The mission involves mapping of floors of deep oceans and development of technologies like a manned submersible with 6000m water depth rating, mining system for deep sea mining. 

High Performance Computing 

The Earth Ministry received ₹759 crore for ‘high performance computing’ in 2024-25 (RE), but the allocation under the head for 2025-26 has been slashed to just ₹5 crore, perhaps because enough was given last year.  

The Budget documents note that the scheme is to set up a petaflops scale HPC facility for the Ministry’s institutes to support numerical modelling for weather and climate forecasting, basic research, and data assimilation. It will also provide computational resources to the academic and R&D community. Also, the initiative will develop a robust computational and visualisation environment to support state-of-the-art big data analytics and AI/ML applications in the earth sciences domain, promoting research in weather/climate applications and advancing AI/ML integration. 

The documents note that the HPC systems deployed across various institutes of the Ministry in previous plan periods have been crucial in enhancing the accuracy of weather forecasts and advancing research and development over the past decade. “These HPC systems have facilitated seamless data assimilation and the generation of precise forecasts with extended lead times from both global and regional Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models, leading to significant improvements in weather, climate, and ocean state predictions,” the documents say.