Editor's Note | Education Engenders Inequality in India

Chats with friends who grew up in a different social milieu often become conversations with your own past. They can leave you oscillating between two emotions: pride in how far you have come, and an instinctive reluctance to revisit where you began.

One such conversation took place a few years ago with a friend, now an economist based in the United States. It reminded me of my inherited kinship with millions of Indian children born into circumstances far removed from the Constitution’s promise of justice, equality and dignity.

My friend had studied at one of Delhi’s elite schools, attended by the sons and daughters of ministers, senior journalists and academics. Almost in passing, he mentioned that coding had been part of his school curriculum long before the word entered the vocabulary of the average Indian.

My own introduction to computers belonged to a different India altogether. From Class IV to VIII, a computer class meant little more than learning how to type symbols such as $, &, * and @ by pressing the Shift key along with the number keys. At the time, that felt no less than a technological breakthrough. My parents took immense pride in what they believed was my growing familiarity with this mysterious machine. Had they seen my friend writing code at the same age, they would probably have concluded that they were in the presence of a rocket scientist.

My first meaningful encounter with a computer came much later, in a neighbourhood cybercafe in the early 2000s. A friend introduced me to Yahoo! Messenger, where the pinnacle of teenage technological ambition was sending an awkward “Hi… ASL?” to strangers and hoping at least one of them turned out to be a girl.

While some schools were preparing children to write code, a skill that would help create India’s storied middle class, the rest of us were learning computers through cybercafe chats and surfing sessions.

India’s education system is the nursery of inequality. It produces generations of children whose unrealised potential later becomes the subject of study across sociology, economics and public policy. There is a story, told and retold in enough Indian drawing rooms to have hardened into folklore, that the English spoken in the missionary and municipal schools of the colonial era was better than what most of our schools produce today. Although it is impossible to verify this empirically, it is a story worth pausing on. In a way, it reveals how India narrates the crisis of its education system. It’s always comforting to be nostalgic about better times that may not have existed. In any case, only 16 out of every 100 Indians could read in 1941. The “good English” of the empire was that of a tiny, curated elite. Everyone else was excluded.

That frame has widened enormously since. India’s literacy rate has climbed from 18.3 per cent at the first post-Independence census to a little over 80 per cent today. This is a genuine achievement. But set against eight decades, it is also a reminder of how slow we have been.

The inequality is no longer about whether a child enters school. India has made remarkable progress on that front. The deeper divide lies in what happens after admission.

According to the latest Annual Status of Education Report, fewer than half of rural Class V students can read a Class II-level text. Only around three in ten can solve a basic division problem. Children in private schools perform far better than those in government schools, although part of that advantage comes from the homes they are born into: educated parents, private tuition, books, devices and the confidence to ask questions.

The Indian school system has therefore achieved a form of exclusion that only reveals itself gradually. While enrolment at the elementary school level is near-universal, it falls at every turn to be around 30 per cent at higher education. What does this indicate?

Many kids lose interest, fail exams and leave education altogether. For poorer families, even free education carries costs. There are uniforms to buy, transport to arrange, private coaching to pay for and wages or household labour to forgo. When years spent in a classroom fail to produce either basic learning or a believable path to a better job, education begins to look less like an investment and more like a gamble. That’s when poor parents feel it is a more certain bet to send their kids to take up menial jobs. Research using national sample survey data has shown that a child from the richest households is several times more likely to pursue higher education than one from the poorest.

India’s public investment in education has also followed a curious hierarchy. The country built some of the world’s most admired institutions of higher learning like the Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of Management and the All India Institutes of Medical Sciences. They regularly produce the most brilliant engineers, doctors, managers and civil servants. But these islands of excellence stand at the end of an extraordinarily unequal journey. To reach them, a child first has to survive differences in school quality, language, geography, household income and access to private coaching.

Now, with the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI), the road might become harder to traverse for these kids. Our cover story delves deeper into this impending crisis (see page 18).

A Force Multiplier

AI is already becoming a force multiplier. It can act as a private tutor available at any hour, explain a mathematical concept in several ways, improve an essay, generate code, simulate a science experiment and help a student prepare for an examination. A child with a laptop, fast broadband, fluent English, an educated parent and a trained teacher can use AI to compound every advantage they already possess.

Elsewhere, the experience may look very different. A child may encounter AI as a chapter in a textbook, taught by a teacher who rarely uses an AI tool, in a school with intermittent internet and a handful of shared computers. Although the curriculum may include ‘artificial intelligence’, the classroom could still be struggling with electricity and basic numeracy.

But such a scenario of doom is not inevitable. If policymakers and civil society act in time, AI could also become the most powerful equalising educational tool. A well-designed AI tutor could help a rural child practise arithmetic without embarrassment, explain science in her home language, support teachers with lesson plans and help them to give personalised attention in a classroom of 50 students.

If India is serious about converting its demographic dividend into national power, it cannot allow that opportunity of AI to slip away. We must give every child the intellectual milieu and technological infrastructure required to seize the age. The nation can’t keep asking its poorest children to wait for a promise the Consti­tution made to them 76 years ago.

(This story appeared in Outlook magazine’s August 3 issue, 'The AI Divide', which focuses on how India's AI education ambitions are colliding with the reality of inadequate digital infrastructure, undertrained teachers and AI tools that are not built around Indian students' cultural context)