Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a pivotal force in reconfiguring India’s educational landscape, enhancing pedagogy, boosting classroom effectiveness, and contributing to national development. The International Monetary Fund’s recent upward revision of India’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth projections to 7.3 per cent for 2026 and 4.6 per cent for 2027 partly attributes this momentum to AI-driven investments. Notably, India accounted for 16 per cent of global generative AI application downloads in 2025, evincing its crucial role in the digital economy.

AI’s integration into teaching-learning processes has already proven to be a game changer in the Indian educational sector although equitable access for rural learners confronting the systemic barriers remains a challenge that needs to be urgently addressed. AI facilitates a transition from traditional, unidirectional instruction to dynamic, data-informed personalisation. Automated systems for grading, attendance tracking, and curriculum adaptation are increasingly liberating educators for facilitative roles, and fostering deeper cognitive engagement. Adaptive platforms, powered by machine-learning algorithms, deliver multilingual content and instantaneous feedback, aligned with India’s linguistic heterogeneity.

A 2025 study featuring 30 Indian Higher Educational Institutions found that over 50 per cent of them used generative AI to develop study materials, while over 60 per cent allowed student use of AI tools. India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 provides the doctrinal foundation for mainstreaming AI. The All-India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) designated 2025 as the ‘Year of AI’, targeting 14,000 technical institutions and equipping 40 million students with AI competencies through dedicated laboratories and certificate programmes. Complementarily, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) is set to implement an AI curriculum from class III commencing in 2026-27, spanning 18,000 schools, emphasising computational thinking, ethical considerations, and practical applications. The University of Madras has pioneered AI in distance education, offering personalised schedules, 24/7 virtual tutors, predictive analytics to identify at-risk students, and virtual labs.

In January 2026, its Samsung Innovation Campus trained 5,000 Tamil Nadu youth in AI, IoT, and coding as a part of a national goal for 20,000 skilled students. For rural students hindered by infrastructural and socioeconomic constraints such as poor transport, family responsibilities, and difficult living conditions, several AI-based platforms now offer asynchronous learning alternatives. Government education platforms like DIKSHA and SWAYAM enable offline, self-regulated learning through pre-downloaded modules, while phoneme-based tools such as Google Bolo support literacy development without requiring continuous connectivity.

Initiatives like these make it possible for students to continue their education without the demands of physical attendance, thereby mitigating exclusionary dynamics. The deployment of predictive analytics by the Andhra Pradesh government in collaboration with Microsoft to reduce student attrition by 20-30 per cent through targeted familial interventions, the development of Iris, ‘India’s first AI teacher robot’ in a Kerala school, and the rollout of PARKAH (Performance Assessment, Review, and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development), the conversational AI chatbot platform for assessment practice in all schools in Goa, and the AI-integrated smart classrooms in schools in West Bengal are just a few other subnational educational initiatives that leverage the quantum leaps in AI.

Reports of an AI-enabled Anganwadi centre in Nagpur bring to focus the transformative capacity of AI in pre-primary education sectors. India’s EdTech market reports a growth rate (CAGR) of 28.7 per cent during 2025-2033. Indian users downloaded 0.6 billion generative AI apps in 2025, a 204 per cent increase from the previous year, driving productivity and human capital formation. Despite progress, India’s digital disparity remains a significant hurdle as only 83.3 per cent rural households have Internet access, compared with 91.6 per cent in urban areas. This digital divide in turn creates an “intelligence divide”, further destabilising the standardisation efforts by governments and education boards.

Research has noted how algorithmic biases, stemming from historical and societal biases, in educational technologies accentuate concerns about fairness and inclusivity. For instance, algorithmic bias has shown to diminish diversity in college admissions processes, highlighting the need for more refined models. AI-learning platforms must account for diverse cultural perspectives to prevent student alienation and loss of trust. Other challenges such as limited teacher training and privacy concerns underscore the high stakes of AI-driven educational practices. According to the 2025 National Sample Survey, only 3.2 per cent of rural households in India are connected via optical fibre cable. Equitable AI deployment necessitates sustained investment in rural broadband, subsidised hardware, and continuous professional development.

Urgent policy measures include algorithmic audits to ensure impartiality and sovereign data governance frameworks. Impartiality in AI systems is essential to safeguard fairness and inclusivity in India’s educational transformation. Without deliberate checks, algorithms risk amplifying existing biases whether linguistic, regional, or socioeconomic, thereby excluding vulnerable learners. By embedding thorough regular audits, transparent data practices, and ethical oversight, AI tools can deliver equitable opportunities, foster trust among both learners and educators, and prevent the emergence of ‘intelligence divide.’ By expanding flexible, attendance-free learning options, India can use AI to reach all 260 million students including those in rural areas and ensure that the benefits of technology- driven education are shared widely.

(The writers are, respectively, a PhD research scholar and an assistant professor at the Department of English, Vellore Institute of Technology.

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