India Faces New Digital Education Gap

India’s education system is on the cusp of a significant technology-led disruption, with the benefits of the AI wave potentially remaining concentrated among a small section of students and institutions unless access and literacy expand rapidly.

Jaspreet Bindra, a digital transformation expert and author, states that this emerging imbalance could evolve into India’s next major digital divide. Bindra, who previously held leadership roles at companies including Mahindra Group and Adobe, emphasizes that the top layer of educational institutions is rapidly adopting AI, while the rest are lagging behind.

The comments come at a time when AI adoption is accelerating across India’s education and edtech sectors, with schools, coaching platforms, and universities increasingly experimenting with AI tutors, automated assessments, and content generation and personalized learning systems. However, Bindra believes India is still far from becoming uniformly “AI-native”.

He noted that the early adopters are primarily premium schools, higher education institutions, and digitally mature academic ecosystems. The higher level colleges, institutions, schools, the more expensive ones are bringing in AI fairly rapidly into their classrooms.

Bindra said the students are gradually becoming digitally connected, even if the classrooms are not AI native.

Some parts of India’s institutional framework, such as the CBSE, have introduced AI-focused coursework at the school level, indicating that AI literacy is beginning to move closer to mainstream education. However, Bindra emphasizes that the larger disruption is not simply about introducing AI tools into classrooms, but about redesigning the way education itself is delivered and evaluated in a world where generative AI can instantly produce essays, summaries, coding assignments, and near-perfect responses.

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Institutions may need to shift towards a “human plus AI” framework, where AI becomes an augmentation layer rather than a prohibited tool. The challenge is how to bring in AI as an aid— as a human plus AI.

This transition could fundamentally reshape examinations and pedagogy across schools and universities, with traditional homework-heavy assessment models giving way to oral evaluations, in-class work, and process-oriented assessments. It will also mean that there will be more one-on-one viva-like oral defenses, more in-class work rather than homework.

As India’s education sector enters the early stages of the AI era, the debate may increasingly move beyond whether AI belongs in classrooms to a more consequential issue: who gets access to the future of learning first.

The success of this transition may depend less on technology adoption alone and more on whether AI capability can be democratized beyond elite institutions, ultimately determining who will benefit from the AI wave and who will be left behind.

Bindra’s thoughts are echoed by experts like Kochhar, who emphasize the need for a unified approach to AI adoption in education.