Scroll through any social media feed or You Tube reel today and a familiar figure appears between the cricket reels and the travel vlogs. He is a confident young mentor with a glowing laptop and a promise: “Learn AI in weeks. Become future-proof.” The vocabulary ke eps changing , from promp t engineering to generative mastery to AI-powered income. The pitch itself is old. It is the coaching-class pitch, repackaged for an anxious age. Anxiety is the real product on sale. The buyer is rarely a curious tinkerer.

He is a final-year student who suspects his degree is already obsolete. She is a mid-career professional who has watched a colleague’s job vanish. He is a graduate still unemployed after years of applications. For each of them, the question “Will AI take my job?” has become a private dread, and dread is the easiest thing in the world to monetise. The marketing leans on a convenient confusion. Brochures speak of “industry-recognised” and “globally valued” certificates, words that sound like regulation but mean nothing in law.

Several IITs, among them Madras, Kharagpur, Guwahati and Bhilai, offer B.Tech degrees in artificial intelligence. AICTE has also allowed AI and data science B.Tech programmes in accredited colleges. These are re al, examine d, accountable qualifications, and they sit at one end of the spectrum. At the other end is a private “certificate of completion”, which is a receipt for attendance and not a credential. It carries only the weight of the brand that issued it, and many brands are a few months old. The tragedy is that the buyer, seeing both on the same screen, cannot tell them apart.

That is not an accident of design. It is the business model. The most embarrassing fact for the paid-course industry is that the state has already built an on-ramp, and it costs nothing. The government’s YUVA AI for ALL course is........

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