The Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB), in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Creative Technologies (IICT), Mumbai, has partnered with Google and YouTube to roll out a nationwide AI skilling initiative, offering 15,000 scholarships to students and young professionals.

The programme is aimed at preparing a future-ready workforce for emerging roles in the creative economy, spanning media, entertainment, animation, gaming and digital storytelling.

According to an official statement, the initiative will focus on equipping participants with practical, job-ready AI skills that can be directly applied in professional creative workflows. Learners will gain exposure to content creation practices, with a particular emphasis on platform-specific strategies, including YouTube.

Two-phase training model

The programme will be delivered in two phases. In the first phase, all selected candidates will undergo foundational training in artificial intelligence through Google Career Certificates and Google Cloud’s generative AI learning paths.

This stage will emphasise AI basics, responsible usage and core conceptual understanding.

Participants who successfully complete Phase I will advance to the second stage, which will feature hands-on projects, storytelling techniques and training in Google’s AI tools. 

The phase will also include best practices for content creation on YouTube and will be conducted in a hybrid format across key creative hubs.

The curriculum has been jointly developed by IICT, Google and YouTube to align with industry requirements, with IICT leading programme implementation, including design, outreach and execution.

Focus on ‘orange economy’

The initiative builds on the earlier ‘Create with AI’ programme launched by IICT and YouTube, expanding it into a structured, national-level training effort.

It also aligns with the Union Budget 2026’s emphasis on the ‘orange economy’—a term used to describe creative sectors such as AVGC (animation, visual effects, gaming and comics), gaming and digital content. 

The Budget highlighted the need to strengthen India’s talent pipeline in creative technologies and proposed the expansion of AI-enabled labs and digital infrastructure, including at the school level.

With this initiative, the government aims to bridge the skills gap and position India as a key player in the rapidly evolving global creative technology landscape.