Several decades ago, what eventually evolved into Grameen in Bangladesh was challenging conventional banking models and the inability of the organised financial system to include the poor within the ambit of banking. The Grameen model, which became the micro-finance revolution across large parts of the world including rural India, challenged the conventional infrastructure intensive outreach that never really embraced nearly 70% of the population living in rural pin codes in India. Now, technology and process refinements including the use of AI developed to facilitate the delivery of banking services for the poor, has mainstreamed microfinance. Witness the several microfinance institutions that have grown into scheduled commercial banks and the transition and absorption of MFIs into the core banking infrastructure of the country becomes evident.
This is one example of process engineering, technology development and innovation by India for the excluded Indian. We need a microfinance moment in India’s education system.
School education in India is accessed by 250MM students, making it perhaps the largest aggregation of children in any schooling system in the world. Like in the banking for the unbanked example cited above and the role of MFIs in catalysing banking penetration to envelop the under-served, the rural child requires better access and use of the schooling system. The urban schooling system has access to better teaching talent. The urban child secures better scaffolding at home from parents and siblings who have been to schools. The urban child is on the better side of the digital divide. It is therefore not surprising that the urban child secures relatively better outcomes both in terms of academic outcomes and in terms of career opportunities.
Academicians and policy makers stand at the cusp of the impending Artificial Intelligence sweep that is expected to re-write the book on school education across the globe, digitizing content, improving digital access and perhaps even improving learning and critical thinking. The real need though is to reduce the hiatus between learning and career outcomes from good foundational education that currently exists between the urban child and the rural child. AI holds a lot of promise and is expected to play a transformational role in reshaping school education in India. This is perhaps the best time for India to ask the question – “How do we use AI to solve problems at population scale, affordably, and inclusively?” because countries that win in AI will not have the best models—they will have the best applications aligned to their realities.
In designing applications for AI that are best aligned with our reality, the system that has emerged is one that does not facilitate learning but sharpens the divide between the urban and the non-urban population. JEE and NEET create a parallel infrastructure that funnels a very small percentage of the school educated into aiming for the very narrow set of opportunities that exist in the extended IIT and AIIMS type institutions. The best amongst those who succeed and go through these elite institutions, progress to migrate to foreign countries. A recent study of JEE toppers over 30 years showed that nearly 75% of the toppers took up post graduate studies in foreign countries and thereafter migrated permanently to these countries. This is the miniscule cream of the best educated in science and math and India. What about the roughly 100MM children in rural and small town India for whom this looks like some paradise that will forever elude them?
Creating a unique pedagogy that addresses the reality of schooling in India, especially in the less developed, resource poor parts of India has never been more needed today than ever before. While observing 10th and 12th standard children undergoing career counselling in remote districts in India brings home the disparity that these children face in comparison with the children from the big cities.
There are two dimensions of this apparent disparity. The first is a “scholastic deficit”. The second is the “confidence deficit”.
The principal deficit is the scholastic deficit which excludes children with weak learning outcomes, especially in math and science, from graduating in courses in the science stream. This in turn leads to their exclusion from competing for higher paying jobs. Several studies have highlighted the poorer measured learning outcomes in math, languages and science at the national level, with some states having outcomes significantly below even the already low national averages.
The confidence deficit often manifests as a lack of awareness of the possibilities for careers of the future. The confidence deficit is explained by the limited world view of child from a low income household and his or her restricted view of the world of opportunities. However, this is not all. The core issue is the poor scholastic performance that puts these children at a serious disadvantage. Children in these schools also lack the access to debate, dialogue, question and collaborate during schooling to develop the ability to compete. Additional disadvantages come from language. The urban child learns English in addition to Indian languages whereas the rural child is largely schooled in the vernacular.
The tyranny of geography plays out in other sectors as well. For example, consider the delivery of healthcare services in India. Access to quality services deteriorates as one goes away from large urban centers. The concentration of capital in the large urban centres to create healthcare infrastructure, to facilitate the availability of trained and qualified medical professionals, to support equipment deployment designed for high throughput and energy certainty, is in sharp contrast to the lack of critical mass and enabling circumstances in smaller towns and villages.
The healthcare and education sectors offer massive business opportunities given the large addressable and underserved markets. In the case of education, the addressable market is between 100-150MM students in the school going age group per annum for at least the next decade or two. As in the case of the evolution of microfinance in India, the opportunity to create an effective solution to address the gap between urban schooling and rural schooling provides tremendous opportunities to address the three key issues of low teacher student ratio, ineffective teaching quality and poor learning outcomes in smaller towns and rural areas.
How do we address this problem?
Over the last 75 years, the Indian education system has succeeded in achieving near full school enrolment, but it still has a long way to go in ensuring that this translates into two outcomes – meaningful learning and job opportunities linked to good learning. Weak learning outcomes have grown over the years. This is reflected in the results of multiple national and global assessments of K12 students on academic capability. A clear indicator of this crisis is that over half the children cannot read a simple text by age 10. The system has scaled participation without ensuring learning. The current system of teaching and learning is a little removed from how children actually learn. That urban India and rural India are served by a common curriculum and pedagogy whereas the requirements of these two geographies are completely different.
Beyond enrolment, a good education system depends on content, delivery, assessment, and how learning gaps are identified and addressed. The central issue for technology intervention in education is addressing the absence of a structured feedback loop between what is taught, what is understood, and how the gaps in understanding are fixed.
The first area for remediation is content.
Open a math or science textbook and the mismatch is evident A Class 9 math problem asks students to calculate the cost of online learning subscriptions or gym usage. A Class 7 science chapter starts with a torch, but quickly assumes that the child has access to appliances like microwave and air conditioners, internet or lab materials. These are presented as real-life examples. The issue is not the contextuality of whether these are urban or rural. It is that a single set of examples is expected to work for children with very different lived experiences. In a classroom where students come from very different backgrounds, the same example can be intuitive for one child and completely abstract for another. The concept may be simple, but the context is not.
The next challenge is delivery.
Though the teacher is the central engine on whom the entire education system pivots, the system does not empower the teacher to improvise. In practice, the teacher is left to translate a standard textbook for a classroom full of students at very different learning levels, often without the tools, training or guidance needed to deal with this complex mix of learning levels. The teacher, under pressure to finish the syllabus moves on with completing the delivery of the lessons and chapters irrespective of whether students have achieved comprehension or not. The class moves on and the gaps in learning quietly builds up year after year.
Teacher training does not prepare them for classrooms with wide diversity in learning levels in a classroom. The focus of training of the teacher should be on moving beyond blackboard instruction and adapting to students at different levels of learning. Training of teachers needs continuous support and reinforcement and a different innovations. Technology allows us to experiment with a different approach now.
Assessment is the next area that requires resolution. Teachers, especially those working in smaller towns and rural areas, need continuous visibility into what each of their students are understanding. Today learning assessments are treated as end-points to determine whether the student has passed or failed to move to the next grade. It is not a tool to measure learning. Further, information is not available to the teacher on effective remediation based on a correct diagnosis of the underlying basis of the lack of comprehension. The assessment feedback loop and the consequent remediation process therefore remains incomplete and ineffective. In urban areas the resolution lies in coaching and tuitions that focus on “maxing” the test. Such scaffolds are not available in rural areas. So, in non-urban areas, over time, the learning gaps tend to accumulate, widen and become harder to bridge.
When a child starts lagging in learning it becomes harder to catch up. When they do not understand what is being taught, and cannot see how it connects to real opportunities, learning starts to feel like a pointless activity. Weak foundations lead to a loss of confidence, which in turn affects motivation and effort, and reduces engagement with learning itself. Loss of confidence and motivation are not separate problems, they are a consequence of how the system works. This limits students’ choices in higher studies and increases the risk of dropping out.
If teaching, learning, and fixing gaps were connected in real time, much of this problem would solve itself. There is now sufficient evidence based on understanding measured learning outcomes to show what works inside classrooms. The most effective innovative interventions are those that directly change how teaching happens. Among these, targeted or remedial instruction like teaching at the right level has shown the largest impact. These approaches recognise that students in the same grade are at very different learning levels and adapt teaching accordingly.
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It is an equal imperative that pedagogy is restructured – breaking down the concepts in each lesson into clear steps to accurate comprehension of the concept, with examples that students can relate to. This will make it easier for teachers to explain and for students to understand. Learning improves when teachers can see what is not working and fix it quickly. This is not a problem that can be solved by rewriting textbooks alone. No single book can anticipate the context of every child in every classroom. What is needed is the ability to adapt how concepts are explained based on who is in the classroom.
This is the role for technology in reshaping education in low resource settings.
India has solved for access to education at scale. The challenge now is to solve for learning at scale – ensuring that outcomes improve consistently across geographies, not just for those with better support systems. Deployed to address this specifically Indian need, Artificial Intelligence can act as a support system for the teacher and help simplify concepts, track learning, and guide interventions in real time. Not as a replacement, but as a tool that strengthens what happens inside the classroom.
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Instead of relying on a fixed set of examples, the teacher must be empowered with choice. The ability to choose what works best for their classrooms. Instead of waiting for end-of-term exams, it becomes possible to identify and fix learning gaps as they happen.
The evolution of microfinance showed that it is possible to build systems that reach the underserved at scale in a way that is both affordable and sustainable. Education now needs a similar shift – to integrate teaching, assessment, and remediation in the classroom by an empowered teacher who can see each child’s unique learning gap and to plug it precisely. If microfinance showed that capital could reach every village, technology can help ensure that real learning can also reach these faraway places – not by replacing teachers, but by helping them see what students are learning, adapt in real time, and address gaps as they emerge.
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There is an opportunity to create a meaningful social transformation of human capital in India, one that is more equitable to those who are still emerging from the other India. A solution that does not dodge the central paradox of India’s education system – regulated expansion in access but increasing disparity in quality of learning outcomes. Resolving this unequal paradigm will unlock the potential for the children in rural and semi-urban India to deepen their participation beyond the statistics of demographic dividend – to creating a more equal society where the best opportunities are available to even those who did not have the privilege of being born in an Indian metro city.
(This article is written by Vibha Tillwali Sharma is the CEO of Prayogtvisha Private Limited and George Thomas is the CEO of Menterra Venture Advisors)
