For representational objective
| Photo Credit: Getty Images
The story to this point:
The U.S.-based ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, introduced the opening of its first workplace in India this yr. Union Minister for Electronics & Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw remarked that India is uniquely positioned to drive the following wave of AI-led transformation. With OpenAI, the India AI Mission goals to construct an ecosystem for trusted and inclusive AI. Besides, one other U.S.-based firm, NVIDIA, a world chief in synthetic intelligence computing, had introduced a partnership with India’s Reliance firm in 2023. The world enterprise giants equivalent to Google and Microsoft have invested closely in AI manufacturing and advertising in India.
Tech-savvy pedagogy
In modern India, teaching and learning are tangled in moral twists and turns as academics and college students are more and more inclined to AI. Integration of superior expertise and pedagogy is arguably a brand new age mantra for the technocratic administration of schooling. A report of the Central Square Foundation that works with the Indian authorities mentioned that about 70% of college academics in India are tech-savvy. Teachers use AI options to design pedagogy and curricular content material. This shall solicit a qualitative analysis of AI literacy and the digital divide in India.
The National Sample Survey report this yr offered details about the digital divide on the degree of high quality and expertise. Although a big proportion of the inhabitants in India makes use of the Internet, the logic of inclusion requires participation in the digital world. Inclusion is evaluated by significant and related use of expertise reasonably than merely utilization.
How significant is the intervention of AI in the academic world? Does ChatGPT improve the standard of teaching and learning? These are the questions that should be requested whereas school rooms incorporate ever-evolving AI options.
Unbridled AI in academic practices
Contrary to the euphoria, the uncritical embrace of AI threatens the philosophical foundations of teaching and learning. Philosophically, pedagogy entails a humanistic dialogue between the trainer and the coed that fosters empathy and belief. The superb pedagogues in the historical past of schooling emphasised the evolution of emancipatory understanding in the classroom. Whether it’s the feminist pedagogue Bell Hooks in the modern world or Rabindranath Tagore in early trendy India, they envisaged a pedagogic alchemy that impressed hermeneutic understanding. The superb academics ensured that schooling was not diminished to the buildup of data. The academic philosophy solicits a pure and natural reasonably than singular AI smartness of the trainer and the taught.
There are additionally moral dilemmas of utilizing AI for pedagogy. According to a survey by the Centre for Teacher Accreditation (CENTA), a excessive proportion of academics make use of AI instruments in the classroom, extra for the fulfilment of technical necessities than for dialogic engagement with college students. The use of AI by college students has grow to be a priority for the Central Board of Secondary Education in India. The CBSE issued an advisory towards utilizing ChatGPT in board exams. Unfair use of the expertise by each academics and college students has handicapped the pedagogical essence of classroom interplay between academics and college students. Although AI is enabling, the moral complexity is seldom a consideration for the technocratic administration of academic institutes.
The present academic practices with AI are diminished to superficial use of expertise. A trainer utilizing audio-visuals by smartphones and computer systems in the classroom is mistaken for pedagogic smartness. The transformative capability of academics, as a substitute, shall be the yardstick for the analysis of pedagogy. Only then can AI in the classroom deliver a few sense of equality together with improved teaching high quality.
India AI mission
India AI’s mission envisages the opening of the AI Centres for Excellence (CoE) in schooling. The mission’s pillars are India AI Compute Capacity, geared to determine the infrastructure to help AI innovation, and India AI Future Skills is in direction of facilitating the abilities to utilise the established infrastructure. These pillars can assist create accessible cloud-based instruments that promote primary digital literacy and equip all academics with expertise to be tech-savvy. However, academics additionally require in-service skilled coaching for capability enhancement to develop an moral understanding and significant integration of AI into pedagogy. Such a coaching shall allow pedagogues to critically consider and make use of expertise, with a nuanced capability to rework the academic practices for a simply society. The coaching modules have to prioritise independence and freedom, creativity and creativeness, of each academics and college students.
The mission’s Application Development Initiative guarantees impactful AI options aimed toward large-scale socio-economic transformation. Such promising elements should be emboldened in a context-sensitive method on the subject of the mixing of AI with academic practices. Only then would AI not reproduce the social and digital inequalities by seemingly unquestionable sensible pedagogy. Without satisfactory social, moral, cultural, and political anchorage, AI could grow to be an anathema defended in rhetoric and abused in apply.
Dev Nath Pathak, Associate Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences, South Asian University; Avantika Dharmani & Vibha S Bharadwaj, Young Scholars, Christ University, Bangalore
Published – October 06, 2025 08:30 am IST