By Ravi Karthik, Chief Growth Officer, ACT Fibernet
I
ndia produces some of the world’s most ambitious students. Every year, millions sit for board examinations, prepare detailed notes, and commit vast bodies of knowledge to memory. However, upon entering the workforce, many of these students discover that what they learned bears little resemblance to what is expected of them. No surprises, therefore, a lot of them don’t find employment. According to the India Skills Report 2025, only 54.81% of Indian graduates are considered employable. This means that nearly half of our graduating youth are entering the job market without the practical skills industries actually require.
Then the gap between the classroom and the real world is widening rapidly, with new age technologies like artificial intelligence specifically driving that distance. Without practical, applied learning built into education from an early stage, India’s most capable young minds risk being underprepared for the world they are already living in. Let’s look at it in some detail:
A curriculum designed for a different era
India’s school system has long built strong academic foundations through structured subjects, textbooks and examinations that encourage discipline, consistency and conceptual understanding. This foundation has helped produce professionals respected globally across engineering, medicine, management and technology. At the same time, the world students are preparing for is changing quickly. Skills such as data interpretation, computational thinking, problem solving and the ability to learn with AI-enabled tools are becoming increasingly important. The opportunity now is not to replace the existing curriculum, but to strengthen it with more applied, personalised and technology-supported learning experiences.
Even the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2023 call for stronger “experiential learning” and inclusion of AI in school education, yet adoption on the ground remains limited. Less than 50% of the schools offer skill-based courses for students in Grade 9 and above, and most rely on optional clubs rather than core curriculum integration. The result is a generation of students who can describe machine learning in an examination answer but have never trained a simple model. No amount of hard work bridges that gap when the learning itself is misaligned.
The cost of keeping up
For families who recognise this gap, the instinct is to supplement. Coaching classes, online platforms, specialised programmes – the market for practical, skills-based education has grown substantially, precisely because the formal system is not filling the space. But this supplementary world carries its own barrier: cost. Premium AI and technology education remains out of reach for the majority of Indian students.
A student in an Indian metro may have access to a well-resourced school, a reliable internet connection, and a parent who can identify and afford the right platform. A student in a semi-urban town or a rural district often has none of these advantages. A structural inequality emerges: those with access to better tools learn faster, qualify earlier, and enter better opportunities, while the rest fall further behind, not for lack of intelligence or effort, but for lack of access.
When the digital divide becomes a skills divide
India’s digital infrastructure has expanded significantly over the last decade. Smartphone penetration is high; broadband access is growing. The ASER 2024 report shows that smartphone availability in rural households has surged dramatically, rising from 36% in 2018 to 67% in 2024. Yet access to a device and access to meaningful, applied learning on that device are not the same thing.
Students in underserved communities often have just enough access to consume content passively, but not enough infrastructure to participate actively in skills-based learning. The result is a second layer of inequality, invisible in access statistics but deeply felt in outcomes.
What meaningful change looks like
Closing this gap requires more than a new government initiative or a revised textbook chapter on artificial intelligence. It requires education to shift from knowledge transfer to skill development. Assignments built around real problems, tools that reflect what industries actually use, and learning environments that allow experimentation and iteration – they are the baseline that every student, regardless of geography or income, needs to compete in the decade ahead.
It also requires the infrastructure supporting that learning to be genuinely accessible – possible only through connectivity that reaches rural classrooms and low-income homes. It needs platforms designed not just for premium users with premium devices, but for students working on modest hardware in less-than-ideal conditions. And it needs collaboration between the technology sector, the education sector, and communities.
India has always invested heavily in its children’s futures. The ambition is not in question. What the age of AI demands now is that the investment be pointed in the right direction – toward learning that is practical, applied, and genuinely within reach of every student who is willing to do the work.
