Russia might cut funding for Digital Economy program by 11 bln rubles in 2024

MOSCOW. Oct 2 (Interfax) - Russia plans to allocate 121.7 billion rubles in budget funding for the Digital Economy national program in 2024, 8.4% or 11 billion rubles less than is allocated in the current law on the three-year budget, a memo attached to the draft federal budget for 2024 and the planning period of 2025-2026 said.

The document (No. 448554-8) has been posted on the State Duma's electronic database.

Spending on the program this year totaled 135.6 billion rubles as of September 1, a summary budget breakdown cited in the draft showed.

The draft budget also cuts funding in 2024 for federal projects that are part of the Digital Economy program.

Digital technologies

The planned budget for the Digital Technologies federal project in 2024 is 11.9 billion rubles, 4.2 billion rubles less than allocated for next year in the current budget law.

Funding is set to decrease by 2.5 billion rubles for projects to develop and roll out Russian IT solutions supported by the grant programs of the Russian Information Technology Development Fund.

There are also plans to cut funding by 3.5 billion rubles for state corporation Rostec's development of a systems project to manufacture telecom equipment for 5G networks and ensure is mass production.

This is because funding will be redistributed to KNS Group LLC (Yadro brand) to develop subsystems for GSM/LTE/NR (5G) base stations, including with the use of Russian electronic components. However, the budget allocation for subsidies to KNS Group for this purpose is set to increase by 2.98 billion rubles.

Infrastructure

Funding for the Information Infrastructure federal project is set to decrease by 1.97 billion rubles to 10.8 billion rubles due to the reduction of budget allocations for a number of areas.

This includes a cut of 592.1 million rubles to funding for the creation of digital, secure communications infrastructure at government agencies, including for provision of digital user devices.

Funding for connecting socially important facilities to broadband Internet services is set to be cut by 428.5 million rubles, and there are plans to reduce funding by 593.7 million rubles for providing certain categories of socially important facilities with secure access to government, municipal and other information systems, as well as the Internet.

Information security

Funding for the Information Security federal project is set to be cut by 7% or 420.8 million rubles from the amount allocated in the current budget, to 5.6 billion rubles.

Funding for the creation and operation of the National Technology Center for Introduction of Modern Cryptography Methods might be slashed by 3 billion rubles. However, funding for the creation and development of a digital economy information security expertise center at the National Technology Center for Digital Cryptography might be increased by 2.6 billion rubles.

AI

The government also plans to cut funding for the Artificial Intelligence (AI) federal project by 558.2 million rubles to 5.2 billion rubles.

This will include a reduction of 19.6.6 million rubles in budget funding for grant support of small businesses for development, application and commercialization of products, services and/or solutions using AI technology, developers of open libraries in the area of AI and acceleration projects using AI.

There are also plans to cut 314.4 million rubles from state support for the Skolkovo Foundation to assist the launch of pilot projects to test AI technology in priority sectors with subsequent scaling of AI solutions over five years.