Social Impact Summit: How technology can bridge India's education divide

Technology will not deepen India's education divide; used well, it could help close it. At the TOI Social Impact Summit, 2026, Pranav Kothari, CEO of Educational Initiatives, broke the myth that edtech is expensive or exclusionary. Technology, he stressed, is not a substitute for teachers, who remain better at inspiration, values, debates, experiments and project-based learning. But technology's strength lies in continuity: Indian schools operate for about 180 days a year and children attend for roughly 140 while learning can continue through the year.

Cyient founder chairman BVR Mohan Reddy said technology can also narrow the rich-poor gap by creating individual learning paths. Unlike a classroom model that often caters to the front benches, adaptive platforms can move each learner at his or her own pace.

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Reddy also urged against fearing AI, warning that the real divide may be between those who understand AI and those who do not. His company adopted 37 government schools, where the share of girls rose from 16-18% to 56% and his school students occupied a lion's share of the merit rankers, and dropouts fell to about 2%. The intervention also expanded into skilling, AI labs and employment-linked training. In one programme, what started as a summer project for his granddaughter Pratinya Bodanapu, rural girls are trained in skills identified through market surveys.

Similar experiences were shared by Abdul Salam KP, vice chairman of Malabar Gold. The connection between poverty and education became stark during Covid while distributing food in urban slums, he said. "We found children on the streets even after schools reopened. That led to slum micro-learning centres, where teachers, uniforms, books and meals are provided and children without documents are helped into formal schools. The network has now grown to about 2,500 centres serving around 1.2 lakh children every day."

Gayatri Nair Lobo, CEO of Educate Girls, said school enrolment is only the first hurdle. Poverty, missing documents, domestic work, early marriage and the distance to secondary schools continue to push girls out. For every 100 primary schools, she said, there are only 20 senior secondary schools. Educate Girls is helping adolescent girls and young women return through open schooling. One, she said, returned after 10 years and went on to top Madhya Pradesh in Class 10.