Daybreak - Inside India’s 90-day countdown for CBSE schools to embrace AI

Episode Date: July 12, 2026

In April, India made AI education mandatory across 28,000 CBSE schools, giving them 90 days to comply. Most had already finalised their academic calendars for the year.Some schools were ready. Others scrambled. A few found that the harder problem wasn't the teachers — it was the students. At one Hyderabad school already using an AI learning tool, kids were From 2029, AI becomes a compulsory board exam subject and the government is betting that deadline will change everything.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Jyotsna B is a school principal and she has a software engineer son to thank for staying up to date with the latest in AI. She wants to understand the frontier technology as much as she possibly can and not just because she's curious. She's a principal of CGR International School in Hyderabad and staying ahead of AI is now part of the job. That's because in April, education minister Dharmedra Pradhan rolled out. a new AI curriculum. And now, it is mandatory for schools to teach it starting this academic year. For students in classes 3 to 5, the curriculum prescribes 50 hours of AI literacy and computational thinking. That same number increases to 100 hours for classes 11 and 12. The CBC, or Central Board of School Education, follow the rollout with a circular in the same month.

It gave its 28,000 affiliated schools, most of them private, with over 20 million students, just 90 days to make this elective subject a part of their compulsory lessons. Of course, this circular sent schools scrambling. Most of them had already finalized their academic calendars six months earlier, before the previous school year broke for summer vacations in March. But Jocana, the principal we mentioned earlier, actually had a head start. Her school was already experimenting with AI tools that were designed to speed up the learning process. And that made her better prepared for the new curriculum, which was designed to teach students to use AI ethically.

And that means other school leaders have to catch up fast. Because from 2029, AI won't just be an ungraded, low-sexuals. takes elective lesson. It will become a compulsory board exam subject for every student starting in class 11. The thing is, this move was not entirely a surprise. Pradhan, in fact, had made the government's intent clear way back in February at the India AI Impact Summit. He had declared that education in AI and AI in education are inseparable. But not every school is ready. Mary Shanti Priya, the principal of Vista International School in Hyderabad, told my colleague, the Ken reporter Atul-Krishna,

that while affluent schools in big cities can adapt quickly, even the private schools in smaller towns may struggle. And that, she believes, will be a problem. At the same time, schools that have already brought AI into classrooms, like CGR International, are learning something a little surprising. Children do love to use AI. but only until they don't. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken.

I'm your host Richard Virgis, and every day of the week, my co-host, Nickas Sharma and I will bring you one new story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Monday, the 13th of July. On paper, the mandate is kind of modest. The new curriculum asks schools to introduce basic AI tools like image classifiers and chatbods,

and even let the schools pick whichever platforms they prefer, without being tied to specific software or technology. In practice, there means that there is no standard system and the schools are kind of left on their own. And turns out, before this curriculum came along, some schools were putting together their own syllabus as early as last year. Take Delhi's ITL public school, for example. It piloted an AI curriculum last year

and now the school uses 14 different tools to teach its 2,000 plus students. Quizlet AI turns notes into flashcards, Gemini builds slides, quick draw teaches students how AI recognizes drawings and perplexity shows them how search works. Vani Sivasawa, a teacher at the school, told Atul that students are asked to generate quizzes using AI. She explained that the quizzes are not just any random set of questions. The students must give the AI a subject and the areas to be covered, and then the students are asked to exchange those questions and discuss them.

There are some other schools, though, who have taken a more frugal approach. Vista International, for instance, with over 1,300 students, relies almost entirely on Google's Gemini. In some ways, though, the government has also been doing its part. In August 2025, it announced 500,000 free chaty-pT licenses for students, teachers and researchers under a six-month tire-up. with Open AI. Some schools who, like the Arise Group, struck their own open AI deals as well. What has also happened is that this freedom to choose whichever software has opened up the door for private players. Jotsna School, for example, has used School AI since November. School AI, by the way, is developed by Co-School, a company which was started by the founders of

Hyderabad's Oak Ridge International School, and it is a learning management system based on Open AISGBT4 model. What the tool does is evaluate student responses in real time and gives instant feedback. It also tracks the performances of each student. If, say, 10 out of 30 students struggle with a topic like Newton's law, for example, the tool nudges the teacher to revisit it before moving on. Nagatumala, co-school's co-founder, said that with contextual feedback that comes when the student is still learning, that is much better than feedback that comes two or three days after the lesson is done.

It also helps ease the load on teachers. Tumala believes that because checking students' work can be taxing, teachers end up giving not as much work as they should. And that is where AI's instant feedback helps. Tumala insists that school AI, used by 52 institutions and over 15,000 students, is more than just a homework tool. It's built-in AI tutor draws only from CBSC textbooks, which works as a guardrail on its own, and it doesn't draw on stuff like Reddit or Kora. It also flags exactly which lessons eight student is weak in, which lets parents, teachers and school managers know exactly where to

focus. The AI also suggests personalized quizzes and videos to students, which explain concepts to them and improve their understanding. They can also use school AI's chat. to understand how AI tools work, all while schools collect the learning data on students. It's also quite an affordable deal for private schools. Schools pay a one-time one-lack rupees onboarding fee and personalized tutoring cost students about $4,000 a year. And yet, school AI somehow hasn't really found the audience it had hoped for. Stay tuned.

Now, you might assume that teachers are the problem. Turns out they are not. They are actually warming up to AI. Kaidani Kholi, co-school's head of product, told Atul that usually it takes a few months, but once a few champion teachers start using AI, the adoption picks up. In the span of the school year,

about 40% of teachers end up using the tool. The real source of apathy are actually the students. They are the ones who are just not logging in. At Jodzna schools, for example, homework is assigned weekly through school AI. It's partly so that the school can build comfort with the tool and partly to track where students are struggling or are doing well. And because gadgets aren't allowed on campus,

students must upload their work from home. Jodzna explained to Atul that the kids usually have tuition, coaching and a lot of other things going on. So they sometimes end up forgetting to submit this homework. And even if the school is assigning homework through AI, the students are not logging in and teachers are getting tired of running behind them. The school even rescheduled maths and science classes so that they happened in the same hours when the computer lab was free, hoping that this would prompt students and make it more convenient for them to use school AI. Still, no luck.

Some teachers believe that the reluctance comes from the parents. A teacher named Priya from Vista International said that they're extra careful about letting kids go online, because then it's harder to control what they're doing. Especially where both parents work and no one's at home, this becomes a real problem. And then there's also the fact that where students are relatively free to use AI, they're mostly using it to generate Instagram face filters and not to do their homework.

But that's a gap the government is betting will close on its own. India's push to make the curriculum mandatory and eventually a boat exam subject from 2029 onwards, may push students to actually take it seriously. But for now, parents are likely to stay cautious. For them, keeping kids off screens still feel safer than getting them AI fluent. And as far as they're concerned, 2029 is still a long time away.

Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of our subscriber-only offerings. Full subscription offers daily long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the Ken website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague Rachel Vargis and edited by Rajiv Sien.