“Education, like every sector, is thinking about how to leverage AI to help children’s education in a meaningful way,” said Shaveta Sharma-Kukreja, CEO of Central Square Foundation (CSF), an education non-profit. At the recently held Google For India event, CSF announced ‘AI Samarth’ – an initiative backed by Google.org that aims to offer AI literacy to over five million students, parents, and teachers. When asked about the motivation behind the initiative, Kukreja said that for teachers and students to effectively use AI, they should be AI literate. A few years ago, CSF did a Bharat Survey for EdTech and found that children, even from low-income households, were actively engaging with technology. “We didn’t want government school children and teachers to just become passive recipients of AI; we wanted them to be active contributors and co-creators. Hence, we launched AI Samarth, which means empowering someone with the use of AI,” she said. The initiative aims to address the rising need for AI awareness and promote the its responsible use. The initiative aims to accomplish the five million target in the next four years. “CSF is a philanthropy, and we've been working in school education for the last 12 years. AI can significantly contribute to enhancing and providing solutions to some of the challenges we face in our education system,” Kukreja told indianexpress.com. Kukreja further illustrated by saying that one of the biggest challenges is that children are not at the grade level where they are aware of AI. “AI, by personalising the learning journey, can help provide instruction at the level of the child. Similarly, there are many other use cases of AI that are relevant to the Indian education system,” she said. Even though companies and working professionals have successfully integrated AI into their work and routine, taking it to the grassroots levels is fraught with challenges. When asked how AI can reach the mass beyond the digital divide, Kukreja said that the focus is on understanding tools like personalised tutors or teacher aids, to ensure safe and effective engagement. “Our hypothesis, and that of the sector, is focused on school education, particularly serving the most high-need communities—children in government and low-fee private schools. These are not resource-rich environments. The responsibility now is to help students, teachers, and even parents understand AI enough to make informed decisions,” Kukreja explained. Gouri Gupta, project director, CSF, said the starting point is where students, parents, and teachers need to be made aware about AI.”And then that awareness moves to understanding, the understanding moves to application, and then application moves to development. And those four stages towards AI literacy - we are looking at Project AI Samarth as a starting point to get our children to become those creators of AI technologies,” said Gupta. At present, India has over 1.5 million schools and 9.5 million teachers for over 265 million students. Both Kukreja and Gupta admit that the prevalent AI literacy initiatives are limited and there is a need for high-quality content and contextual curriculum with a focus on AI. To tackle the challenges at sale, the initiative aims to develop expert-reviewed AI literacy curriculum along with an open-source high-quality content library. Since AI is undergoing rapid development with each passing day, educators would be hard-pressed to keep their curriculum relevant. Kukreja said that even though the pace of progress is rapid, the core principles such as equity, safety, and ethical use of AI remain the same.
