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

**Rachel Varghese** (0:01)
Jyotsana B is the 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 the 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 Dharmendra 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 CBSE or Central Board of School Education followed the rollout with the 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 Jyotsana, 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-stakes 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.
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On paper, the mandate is kind of modest. The new curriculum asks schools to introduce basic AI tools like image classifiers and chatbots, and even let the schools pick whichever platforms they prefer without being tied to specific software or technology. In practice, that 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 Srivasava, 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 TrajPT licenses for students, teachers, and researchers under a six-month tie-up with OpenAI. Some schools, though, like the Arise group, struck their own OpenAI deals as well. What has also happened is that this freedom to choose whichever software has opened up the door for private players. Jyotsana School, for example, has used SchoolAI since November. SchoolAI, by the way, is developed by CoSchool, a company which was started by the founders of Hyderabad's Oak Ridge International School, and it is a learning management system based on OpenAI's GPT-4 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. Naga Tumala, CoSchool's co-founder, said that with contextual feedback that comes when the student is still learning, that is much better than feedback that comes 2 or 3 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.