India has massive potential for disruptive growth in the field of AI-driven innovations, owing to her bulging youth population with a natural affinity for computer science education and IT careers. The economic incentive is huge too, as AI is projected to add over $500 billion and almost 20 million jobs to the Indian economy by 2025. India’s “AI for All” strategy focuses on building AI solutions at scale with the target of establishing the country as the AI garage of the world. One of the significant impediments along the way, however, is the disproportionate availability of skilling and education opportunities compared to their enormous, and urgent, need. Therefore, the government has invested heavily in initiatives to drive the AI revolution by onboarding more and more people on the AI bandwagon.

Among the most noteworthy efforts of the government to disseminate AI knowledge to students in the farthest corners of the country is the SWAYAM—NPTEL platform that offers free online learning through an MOOC model. The National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) has emerged as one of the biggest repositories of engineering and technical courses in the world; it is also the world's most subscribed education channel on YouTube. Among the various engineering domains included on NPTEL is Computer Science which includes AI and allied fields. It allows any Indian student to benefit from virtual study material and earn IIT certifications after appearing in proctored exams. Giving access to all Indian students to lectures by India's top faculties, and making provisions for them to earn transferable credits for their learning while sitting in far-flung areas of this vast nation — this is a true example of democratisation of knowledge as more and more students get to live the IIT dream.

The Director of IIT Madras, Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthi, also the Chairman of NPTEL's Project Implementation Committee, believes that “NPTEL is the harbinger of a big intervention in India in the area of online education so that we can address the grand challenge of providing a high quality and useful education to a very large, probably the largest number of youngsters in the world."

While relevant training of the emerging technologies of industry 4.0 is an employment facilitator for young engineers, it is also a favourable proposition for the employers. A well-educated and conceptually sound student community will translate into a better-equipped workforce for the AI economy, so the value addition for the industry from NPTEL can be immense. K Ananth Krishna, CTO of India's premier IT company Tata Consultancy Services, believes that “Learning on a platform like this is by itself an extremely satisfying experience because you’re learning from the best faculty, you’re benchmarking yourself against your peers and you’re completing a necessary part of your IT learning on one of the best ways to learn in a 21st century model.”

To take this initiative forward and to encourage more students across colleges to participate in it, the Ministry of Education has set up SWAYAM—NPTEL local chapters in colleges to ensure that the program is implemented smoothly and the students' concerns are addressed directly. The benefits of online skilling are being extended to the teacher community as well who, starting 2018, is eligible to accumulate NPTEL credits for Faculty Development Programme (FDP) of AICTE.

The idea of exposing young students to AI from an early age has found resonance with educators and policymakers alike, so India is leading the way by integrating Artificial Intelligence in the school curricula. CBSE has introduced AI as a subject for class 10 and 12 students. And it is the New Education Policy 2020 that takes it a step ahead by offering Coding as a subject from class 6 onwards. But the country’s resolve to make the AI transformation inclusive and equitable can be demonstrated in the “Responsible AI for Youth” program which is targeted at the bright young minds in India’s government schools. In the first phase, 11,000 students have already been trained for an AI-ready future under this program which is a joint initiative of National e-Governance Division, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), and Intel India. 

The dynamic and disruptive nature of emerging technologies makes it imperative to reskill the existing workforce, in addition to training the upcoming claimants to the job market. As per estimates, more than a third of the 4.5 million people employed in the IT/ITES industry are expected to require training for the AI-dominated future. To enable this mass-scale reskilling exercise, MeitY and the IT industry body NASSCOM have launched the Futureskills programme in 2018. By providing a learning system enriched with free and paid content, assessments, virtual labs, etc., the programme aims to reskill two million professionals, potential employees and students over a period of five years.

Image by Selena Jain from Pixabay