New Delhi: The conversation at FITT Forward 2026, IIT Delhi’s flagship innovation summit, was expected to revolve around semiconductors, sovereign AI, deep-tech startups and technology capital.
But running through several sessions was a different question: Is India’s education system preparing students to solve the problems the country is trying to solve?
The question surfaced in an unexpected exchange involving former India fast bowler Bhuvneshwar Kumar and two 10-year-old founders. It also emerged more sharply in discussions involving industry leaders, academics and policymakers on engineering education, research, agriculture and AI literacy.
During a fireside conversation on the transition from sporting performance to entrepreneurship, Kumar spoke about his move into investing and the importance of the founder behind a startup.
His own experience as a fast bowler had also shaped one of his investments, Aires, a startup developing cricket-specific footwear designed around the impact generated when a fast bowler lands after delivery.
For Kumar, the lesson from sport carries over to entrepreneurship: talent alone is not enough. The ability to make decisions under pressure and recover from setbacks matters just as much.
That discussion took an unexpected turn when Medhansh and Vedaan, both 10 and students of Heritage Xperiential Learning School, were invited on stage. The two are co-founders of early-stage venture The Curious Co., which focuses on curiosity-based learning.
Instead of pitching their startup, the two asked Kumar questions.
Medhansh asked why athletes still need coaches after becoming skilled. Vedaan asked why people need to lose sometimes.
The questions reflected the idea behind their venture: moving children beyond recalling facts towards asking questions that require reasoning.
The idea emerged from a simple question at home. Medhansh knew where the Taj Mahal was, but when asked why it was in Agra, the answer required him to connect history, geography and reasoning.
The Curious Co. has raised an initial seed round from friends and family and constituted a board. FITT Managing Director Dr. Nikhil Agarwal even asked from the stage whether FITT could invest in the venture, although no investment was announced.
The exchange was brief, but it mirrored a much larger conversation taking place elsewhere at the summit.
Industry questions India’s engineering education model
On a manufacturing and semiconductor panel, Cadence’s Taranjit Kohli questioned whether India’s engineering education is adequately preparing students for real-world hardware development.
He argued that postgraduate research at IITs can remain overly focused on abstract and publishable projects rather than problems that need to be solved on the ground.
He also pointed to limited collaboration between engineering disciplines. Developing hardware, he noted, often requires electronics, mechanical and civil engineering capabilities to work together.
Kohli warned that private institutions could eventually move faster than IITs if academic programmes and research systems do not adapt, and called for a stronger pipeline connecting finishing schools, design houses, packaging facilities and fabrication.
Maruti Suzuki’s Dr Shailendra Singh offered another diagnosis: the problem is not necessarily the quality of graduates, but their lack of hands-on experience.
That gap led Maruti to establish its own training centre rather than rely only on classroom education.
IIT Delhi’s Prof Sunil Jha suggested a parallel translational research track for PhD students, alongside fundamental research. Such a track, he said, could focus on solving and productising existing problems within four to five years.
The discussion pointed to a broader challenge for higher education: how to preserve fundamental research while making universities more responsive to industry and societal needs.
From ‘lab to land’ to ‘land to lab’
The same question surfaced in the agriculture discussion.
Prof B.R. Kamboj, Vice Chancellor of CCS Haryana Agricultural University, proposed reversing the traditional “lab to land” model to “land to lab”.
Instead of developing research in laboratories and subsequently testing it with farmers, he argued for involving farmers in the research process from the beginning.
The emphasis was on making research more responsive to problems emerging in the field.
IIM Shillong Director Prof Arun Mohan Sherry also spoke about the need to think beyond conventional measures of institutional prestige. He cited an example of a Kerala business school that had deliberately positioned itself around regional value rather than a global identity, with a predominantly female student population and strong returns on tuition relative to average starting salaries.
The examples differed, but the underlying message was similar: institutions need to define educational value around outcomes and context, rather than simply credentials or rankings.
AI brings a new layer to the education debate
AI added another dimension to the discussion.
IndiaAI Mission COO Kavita Bhatia announced a free, credit-bearing 4.5-hour AI literacy course that will be available in Indian languages. The course is intended to provide citizens with a basic understanding of AI, its uses and its risks.
The focus on AI literacy comes as universities and schools grapple with a technology that can simultaneously support learning and challenge traditional models of assessment, teaching and skill development.
For IIT Delhi, the larger innovation ecosystem is already substantial.
Prof Rangan Banerjee, Director, IIT Delhi, said the institute is currently home to around 325 startups across its Research and Innovation Park and Atal Innovation Center at Sonipat.
“Our goal is to see that we can actually make a difference in society through our technology, through our products, and we would like to see many more student and faculty startups,” Banerjee said.
He also underlined IIT Delhi’s role in strengthening the wider startup ecosystem in the Delhi-NCR region.
FITT Managing Director Dr Nikhil Agarwal framed the startup ecosystem through a cricket analogy, comparing startups with batsmen and bowlers, investors with umpires and customers with the spectators who ultimately respond to the performance.
His larger point was that building technology is only one part of building a startup. The technology also has to find a market.
That distinction between building something and making it useful was reflected across the summit’s education discussions as well.
Whether the subject was semiconductor research, agricultural innovation, AI literacy or a pair of 10-year-olds challenging the primacy of factual recall, the recurring theme was a shift from knowing answers to developing the ability to ask better questions, work with real problems and turn knowledge into outcomes.
At a summit focused on the technologies India hopes will shape its next phase of growth, that may have been one of the more consequential questions raised.
