India’s education system is entering a fundamental transition as AI makes information increasingly accessible and employers demand skills that traditional classrooms have often struggled to cultivate.
From interdisciplinary learning and problem-solving to AI literacy and human judgement, educators and technology leaders argue that education itself must evolve.
India’s education challenge is no longer simply one of scale. It is increasingly one of relevance.
The country has roughly 1.5 million schools, more than 8.5 million teachers at the primary and secondary levels and over 260 million students. Higher education adds more than 40 million enrolments annually across more than 1,000 universities and 42,000 colleges.
Yet, much of the system still relies on rigid curricula, discipline-specific education and examination-oriented learning. As AI changes how knowledge is accessed and applied, that model is coming under increasing pressure.
The emerging argument is that classrooms must focus less on what students can memorise and more on what they can understand, question, solve and create.
Between 2021 and 2025, Chinese universities scrapped or suspended more than 12,200 undergraduate programmes, while adding roughly 10,200 new courses—a sweeping restructuring of higher education as institutions adapt to changing industry and technology demands, as reported by South China Morning Post.
Recent moves in Karnataka are highlighting the mounting challenges facing India’s higher-education system.
For the 2026–27 academic year, the state government has scrapped 458 BA, BSc and BCom programme combinations across government first-grade colleges, primarily because of weak student demand and other considerations. It has also cut seat capacity across more than 1,300 programme combinations, signalling a broader rethink of courses that are struggling to attract students.
From Disciplines to Problem-Solving
Speaking to AIM, former DRDO Chairman Samir V Kamat points to the structure of higher education as an area that needs to change.
“If you want to do any technology development or product development, you need this track, interdisciplinary education,” he says. “Any technology or product you want to develop, you need a little understanding of one discipline, a little understanding of another.”
He points to newer institutions such as Plaksha University, a Mohali-based technology institution for the future where programmes combine areas including AI and data science, as examples of the direction education could take.
Its BTech programmes deliberately break traditional engineering silos. It offers programmes in computer science and AI, robotics and autonomous systems, biological systems engineering, and data science, economics and business.
The objective, he says, should ultimately be the ability to create.
“The purpose of education is to be able to create something. This will help us in creating products and technology,” Kamat says.
The shift is particularly relevant to technology education, where building a product can require knowledge of software, data, hardware, design, business and domain-specific expertise.
“Today information is readily available,” Kamat says. “So education has to move away from giving information, to teaching us how to solve a problem.”
That represents a significant departure from the classroom’s traditional role.
The argument is not that teachers are becoming irrelevant. Rather, their role may become more important at a higher level.
If AI can explain a concept, summarise information or produce an answer, students need to learn how to determine whether that answer is correct, what evidence supports it, what assumptions it contains and how it can be applied.
This also raises questions about degrees whose primary value remains information delivery.
With AI increasingly capable of supplying and synthesising information, Kamat argues that “a lot of colleges and degrees are becoming redundant”.
That does not necessarily make higher education less important. Instead, it places greater pressure on institutions to demonstrate the value they add beyond access to information.
AI Right Now is What IT was 30 Years Back
Speaking to AIM, Maneesh Singh, VP of ML at BharatGen, takes the argument further, suggesting that AI literacy could eventually become as fundamental as computer literacy.
“AI right now is what IT was 30 years back,” he says. “Everybody has to understand what computational intelligence is going to permeate everything—whether you’re doing social sciences, history, this, that and so on and so forth.”
He argues that AI will not remain confined to software development or technology companies.
“What does any person do? Organise... anybody takes some inputs in, and he produces some outputs. That’s a function. If that’s a function, then AI can learn that in any area—whether it’s hospitality, HR, this and that.”
The implication for education is that AI could become a layer across disciplines rather than another standalone subject.
Students may therefore need to understand not only how to use AI tools but also how intelligent systems work, what their limitations are and when human intervention is necessary.
He also highlighted the evolution of AI from systems that relied heavily on manually designed rules and features to systems that learn from data and create functions which are much better than these manually designed approaches.
As AI systems become more sophisticated internally, their interfaces are simultaneously becoming easier for ordinary users to interact with.
For education, that could mean students increasingly communicate their intent and problems while increasingly complex AI systems handle the technical processes underneath.
But greater capability also brings a question of control.
“How do you control something which is nonlinear... there are limits to control it,” he states.
AI Education Needs to Reach Schools
If AI is becoming a general-purpose technology, the shift cannot be restricted to engineering colleges and postgraduate programmes.
“I think they should be even pushed down lower—to schools,” Singh says.
However, he cautioned against turning AI education into another form of narrow vocational training.
“It should not be mindless, that you teach them skills. That’s where I differ from other people.” Instead, he says, students should begin learning about the underlying concepts of intelligence and computation.
The distinction is important. Teaching students how to operate today’s popular AI tools may quickly become outdated. Teaching them how to reason about intelligence, computation, evidence and decision-making could remain relevant even as models and interfaces change.
The Bigger Challenge is Institutional
The technology may be evolving rapidly, but education systems change much more slowly.
Asked whether India’s schools could undergo major transformation over the next 10 or 20 years, Singh highlights the institutional barriers.
He also argued for greater involvement from local governments and municipalities.
Drawing on his three decades of experience living in the US, he pointed to a system in which local taxation directly supports schools.
“Some of the local taxes... go directly to the school... It is not like the schools have to go and ask for the money. There’s a portion of your state taxes, which are local taxes; they go to schools directly. So something similar has to happen over here,” he states.
AI Cannot Replace Institutional Wisdom
For educational institutions, however, the question is not simply whether to adopt AI. It is where technology creates value and where human judgement must remain central.
“The need to see these developments holistically is only reinforced by recent incidents, ranging from violence in schools to extreme pressure around expensive technology and concerns about AI’s role in student behaviour,” Aditya Chowgule, President, Chowgule Education Society, tells AIM. “AI could improve the quality of homework and projects, but there are increasing concerns about independent thinking and higher-order reasoning. The way forward, therefore, is the wise middle path, steered by institutional wisdom, faculty upskilling, diligence and innovative adaptation. The time for this transition is now. Institutions cannot wait for the future to arrive.”
That emphasis on adaptation is also shaping university-level curriculum redesign.
“Traditional education was designed to transmit knowledge. AI now makes knowledge instantly accessible so our real value lies elsewhere: teaching students how to think, adapt, and apply. At Chandigarh University Online, we’re redesigning our programs around this shift—building curricula with industry partners like PwC, PMI, Microsoft, personalising learning through AI-driven tools,” Gurpreet Singh, Director, Chandigarh University Online, tells AIM.
What the Classroom Needs to Become
The debate around AI in education is therefore ultimately a debate about the purpose of education itself.
Students will still need fundamentals, facts and conceptual understanding. But they will also need to learn how to question information, identify errors, solve unfamiliar problems, work across disciplines, collaborate and exercise judgement.
India has the scale to reshape education for hundreds of millions of learners. The harder question is whether its institutions can evolve quickly enough.
In an AI-driven economy, knowing the answer may matter less than knowing which problem to solve, how to solve it, how to question the machine—and when not to trust it.
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