By Sanjay Fuloria, PhD
Walk into any Indian campus today and artificial intelligence is already at work. Students use it to write assignments. Faculty use it to set question papers. Admissions offices use it to shortlist applicants. Libraries use it to answer queries. Accreditation bodies now use it to verify institutional data. Yet ask most universities who is formally responsible for how AI is used, governed, and secured on campus, and the honest answer is often nobody. This gap is no longer a minor administrative oversight. It is becoming a strategic risk that Indian higher education can no longer afford to ignore.
A system driven from the bottom up
India’s higher education system is enormous by any global standard. According to the Ministry of Education’s All India Survey on Higher Education, the country has more than 58,000 higher education institutions, including over 1,168 universities and 45,000 colleges, serving close to 43 million students. The Gross Enrolment Ratio has climbed steadily to over 28 percent. This scale is a genuine achievement. It is also precisely why AI and data cannot be left to informal ownership. A system this large, spread across states with very different levels of digital maturity, needs someone at the leadership table whose full-time job is to think about AI and data as an institutional asset and an institutional risk at the same time.
Institutional policy has not led this shift. Students have. India now accounts for the largest share of ChatGPT’s mobile users of any country in the world, at roughly 13.5 percent of the global total, according to the 2025 Mary Meeker Internet Trends Report. OpenAI itself has disclosed that users under 30 account for around 80 percent of all ChatGPT usage originating from India. In other words, the generation currently sitting in Indian classrooms is already AI native, whether their institution has a policy for it. Faculty are left improvising assessment rules on their own, often inconsistently across departments in the same university. That is not governance. It is drift, and it needs someone to own it.The pressure to govern and comply
The case is not only about capturing opportunity. It is also about managing exposure. Indian educational institutions face an average of over 8,000 cyberattacks a week, more than double the global average, according to cybersecurity researchers tracking the sector. A separate pilot study by the CyberPeace Foundation found over two lakh cyberattacks and nearly four lakh data breaches directed at Indian educational institutions in just nine months, concluding that Indian HEIs are roughly five times more vulnerable to data breaches than institutions with stronger cyber practices elsewhere. Universities hold some of the most sensitive personal data that exists, spanning admissions records, academic transcripts, health information, and increasingly, biometric and financial data linked to scholarships and fee payments.
Layered on top of this is the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, and its Rules, notified in November 2025. The law applies directly to educational institutions as data fiduciaries, requires verifiable parental consent for processing children’s data, and carries penalties that can run up to 250 crore rupees for serious violations. Compliance of this order cannot be managed as a side task for an already stretched IT department or registrar’s office. It needs dedicated, senior ownership.
Part of the difficulty is that national oversight itself is fragmented. Research examining India’s AI governance in higher education has found that the only instrument currently being applied to AI generated content is the UGC’s 2018 regulation on academic integrity and plagiarism, a rule written years before generative AI existed and containing no AI specific provisions at all. The UGC and AICTE do not jointly issue AI guidance, while the IndiaAI Mission itself sits under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology rather than the Ministry of Education. Individual institutions are effectively left to interpret the gaps themselves. Someone inside each university needs the mandate and the expertise to do that interpretation responsibly, rather than leaving it to chance or to whichever department moves first.
There is also a very immediate, very Indian pressure point. NAAC’s new binary accreditation framework, rolled out from August 2025, is built around AI enabled verification of institutional data and expects HEIs to maintain clean, structured digital records of academic, administrative, financial, and governance information. Currently only around 40 percent of universities and 18 percent of colleges hold NAAC accreditation, and the council has set a public target of covering over 90 percent of institutions by 2030. Institutions that cannot organise, verify, and present their own data reliably will struggle with the accreditation process itself, quite apart from any teaching or research consideration.
What the role does
A Chief AI and Data Officer is not simply a rebranded IT head. The role sits across four areas that currently have no single owner in most Indian universities: academic policy on AI use in teaching, learning, and assessment; research data governance and integrity; operational applications of AI in admissions, student support, and predictive analytics; and compliance with data protection law and cybersecurity practice. It also means faculty capacity building, since AI literacy among teaching staff remains uneven, and sensible vendor management, since institutions are being pitched AI tools at a pace few academic committees can properly evaluate.
The precedent already exists elsewhere. Several public universities abroad have appointed their first Chief AI Officers or Chief Data and AI Officers since 2024, often paired with dedicated investment in AI infrastructure and research. India’s own government has effectively accepted the same logic at the national level, backing the IndiaAI Mission with a five-year outlay exceeding 10,000 crore rupees and setting up a dedicated Centre of Excellence for AI in education. If the country believes AI needs dedicated national leadership, individual institutions need the same logic applied at their own scale.
Indian higher education does not need another circular or another one-day workshop on AI. It needs a named, accountable leader in every serious institution, someone whose job is to hold together opportunity, risk, and compliance before the next data breach, the next accreditation cycle, or the next generation of AI native students forces the decision anyway.
Dr Sanjay Fuloria serves as the Director of the Center for Distance and Online Education (CDOE) at ICFAI Foundation for Higher Education (IFHE), Hyderabad.
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETEDUCATION does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETEDUCATION will not be responsible for any damage caused to any person or organisation directly or indirectly.
