AI’S CLASS ACT

From schools and colleges to law universities, medical campuses and counselling rooms, artificial intelligence has entered education quietly. Experts, however, sound a note of caution

- SUGANDHA MUKHERJEE

NA WINTER afternoon in North Campus, a senior professor at Delhi University (DU) flips through a batch of undergraduate essays by Hindi literature students on her desk.

The writing is fluent, the arguments neatly arranged. Nothing is obviously amiss.And yet, she pauses. “Five years ago, my worry was plagiarism,” she says.“Now my worry is intellectual absence.”

The scale at which these changes are unfolding is vast. India’s school education system serves 24.8 crore students across 14.72 lakh schools, taught by 98 lakh teachers, as per government data. Higher education is no smaller. India now has 4.33 crore students enrolled, up from 3.42 crore in 2014-15, with the gross enrolment ratio for the 18-23 age group rising from 23.7% to 28.4%. In absolute terms, this places India among the largest education systems in the world, one now absorbing artificial intelligence (Al) at scale.

Under the National Education Policy 2020, Al is being positioned as a core component of future-ready learning, with an emphasis on innovation and digital literacy. The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has already introduced Al as a subject in affiliated schools, first at Class 9 in the 2019-20 academic year, and later extended to Class 11.

At the just concluded India AI Impact Summit 2026, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the launch of the Google AI Professional Certificate Program. As part of its broader skilling push, Google will also support Atal Tinkering Labs, under the Atal Innovation Mission, to bring generative Al assistance to over 10,000 schools and 11 million students in India. The initiative aims to integrate robotics and coding into local curricula, embed Gemini into teacher workflows, and develop a “safely guardrailed Al assistant”.