These decisions came ahead of the Lok Sabha elections in the country which will benefit more than 100 million employees and pensioners before.

Cabinet announces Dearness Allowance Hike

The Union Cabinet has approved to release an additional instalment of Dearness Allowance (DA) to Central Government employees and Dearness Relief (DR) to pensioners from January 1, 2024, representing an increase of 4 percentage points over the existing rate of 46 per cent of the basic pay/pension, to compensate against price rise, Union Minister Piyush Goyal said after the Cabinet meeting.

The combined impact on the exchequer on account of both Dearness Allowance and Dearness Relief would be Rs 12,869 crore per annum. The impact would be Rs 15,014 crore during the year 2024-25 (January 2024 to February 2025).

With the increase in DA, transport allowance, canteen allowance, and deputation allowance among others have been increased by 25 per cent. House Rent Allowance has been raised from 27 per cent, 19 per cent and 9 per cent of basic pay to 30 per cent, 20 per cent and 10 per cent, respectively.

Cabinet approves 'India AI Mission'

The Cabinet approves India AI mission with an outlay of Rs 10,372 crore for five years, Union Minister Piyush Goyal said on Thursday.

The approved corpus will be used to to create a large computing infrastructure.

The minister, briefing reporters after the Cabinet meeting, said supercomputing capacity, comprising over 10,000 GPU, will be made available to various stakeholders for creating an AI ecosystem.

Startups, academia, researchers and industry will be given access to the AI supercomputing infrastructure established under the India AI Mission, Goyal said.

A National Data Management Officer will be set up under the mission that will coordinate with various government departments and ministries to improve the quality of data and make them available for AI development and deployment.