India has reached a rare national consensus: Education must change. The outrage over examination leaks and widespread corruption creates an opportunity to go far beyond securing question papers, punishing brokers, or tightening supervision. India has the chance to shed the colonial baggage that has constrained its classrooms for generations — and build an education system for the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Examinations have long defined learning in India, with children spending their formative years memorising answers and chasing test scores, rarely given the ability to reason, question, create, or solve real-world problems. This fixation on high-stakes testing has created an economy of desperation and corruption. When a single score can dictate a child’s entire future, marks become a commodity, coaching becomes a multibillion-dollar industry, and stolen papers become extraordinarily valuable. Corrupt officials, brokers, and criminal syndicates profit from families driven by the fear that one exam will make or break their children’s lives.
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AI will make this old form of cheating look primitive. Students already use AI to write essays, generate research papers, produce code, and answer examination questions — all while understanding virtually none of it. The next wave of academic fraud will no longer rely on officials secretly selling leaked papers. Instead, machines will quietly perform the very work that schools continue to mistake for learning.
The education system clearly demands a radical overhaul and AI can help India build something far better. But to understand what should replace the old model, we must first understand how we arrived here.
The British imposed an educational model engineered entirely to serve an empire. They required compliant clerks and obedient administrators to enable them to govern a vast nation. Examinations were used to sort Indians by recall, conformity, and usefulness to their white masters.
Thomas Macaulay explicitly sought to create a class that was Indian by birth, but English in intellect, tastes, and opinions — sidelining India’s rich traditions of philosophy, mathematics, medicine, and debate. A civilisation that gave the world Nalanda and Takshashila was subjugated and trained to seek legitimacy from foreign rulers.
India won independence, but sadly the structural baggage of colonial education remained. The country now has the chance to complete the unfinished work of independence: By designing a system that once again develops original thinkers, pioneering scientists, bold entrepreneurs, visionaries, and courageous leaders.
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That transformation begins by redefining learning itself, and fortunately, India already knows how — because it taught the world how to learn. Long before standardised testing and rigid classrooms, education across India was anchored in the guru-shishya tradition and the gurukula. Learning was rooted in a personal relationship with a teacher who understood each student’s unique temperament, abilities, and pace. Teaching was tailored to the individual, weaving knowledge together with character, discipline, curiosity, and the courage to ask difficult questions.
That ancient principle remains completely relevant today: Every child learns differently, and education becomes transformative when it nurtures the whole person. Technology, for the first time, allows us to apply this concept at scale. AI can provide every child with a personalised tutor that speaks their mother tongue, adapts to their pace, and presents ideas through tailored pathways. It can identify gaps in comprehension and democratise quality instruction across all languages. Relieved of repetitive drills and mechanical grading, teachers are freed for their highest purpose: mentoring students, cultivating judgment, and igniting curiosity.
India must also restore its tradition of disciplined intellectual debate, and the world’s greatest historic centre of learning is once again showing the way forward. Nalanda University, in its revived form, has resurrected Śāstrārtha — the rigorous examination of ideas through structured dialogue and argument. In this tradition, scholars were required to master opposing positions, present concrete evidence, defend their logic, and listen carefully before responding.
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Nalanda has integrated Śāstrārtha into its academic calendar and convocation process, requiring students to defend their research orally before panels of scholars. This practice relies on two pillars: Pūrvapakṣa, demonstrating a thorough understanding of the opposing argument, and Uttarapakṣa, delivering a reasoned, evidence-based response. Students are judged on logic, evidence, and intellectual honesty, rather than merely the polish of a written submission.
This model offers the ultimate antidote to AI-generated slop. A student can easily prompt a machine to produce an impressive paper, but genuine understanding is tested when asked: Why do you hold this view? What evidence contradicts your thesis? What assumptions are you making? Borrowed words always collapse under serious questioning.
Primary and secondary schools should embrace this same principle. Students should spend more time discussing ideas, solving real-world challenges, conducting experiments, and defending their work. Major projects should feature oral defences. An AI-generated answer offers little protection when a student must explain the reasoning and apply it to a new problem.
India should continue to absorb the best of western science and technology, but the oppressive machinery left behind by the British must no longer define the limits of its ambition. That system served an empire and rewarded passivity, rote learning, fuelled systemic corruption, and constrained generations of Indian genius. India has finally outgrown it.
This is the moment to free teachers to inspire, give every child a personalised path to mastery, and restore dialogue, questioning, and intellectual courage to the heart of the classroom.
India once taught the world how to learn. In the age of AI, it has the opportunity — and the duty — to do so again.
Vivek Wadhwa is CEO, Vionix Biosciences. The views expressed are personal