Beyond the blackboard: India needs a fluid education policy in the age of AI

For the better part of a century, India’s education system has trained humans to behave like machines—to calculate, memorise and follow logic—and perfected that craft just as machines began doing all three better than we could.

We still mass-produce the very skills artificial intelligence (AI) has made abundant and cheap, while the capacities AI cannot mimic—judgement, curiosity, the ability to ask the right question—remain an afterthought.

The old promise, that a skill and a degree guaranteed a stable career, is being dismantled by technology itself. India’s education policy must learn how to keep learning.

The journey so far : Our policy has always been reactive to its moment. In 1968, a young nation used education to forge a national identity and basic literacy. In 1986, Operation Blackboard carried schooling into rural India while pivoting to computer literacy that fuelled a global information technology (IT) boom.

Online Coverage: Live Mint