Addressing AI and Inequality in India's Education System

Addressing AI and Inequality in India's Education System

India, a country known for its diversity, has also witnessed a sharp rise in inequality in the recent decade. This may lead to social unrest when the differences become quite glaring. A large part of the problem can be attributed to the fatalist nature of society, which prepares people to accept their misery. Fatalism is the philosophical doctrine that all events are predetermined and therefore inevitable, a belief that individual human actions cannot alter the course of the future. Those who subscribe to this belief think that their lives are governed by fate or destiny. This belief often prevents them from seeing how economic and political institutions perpetuate inequality and cause misery for a large number of people. As long as the differences grew gradually, it appeared natural, but now the AI-induced differences will accelerate the inequalities to an extent that it will be difficult for people to continue believing in fatalism.

It's a usual sight on an Indian highway to see people riding bicycles to their jobs, using the edges of the road to avoid being run over by the big cars dominating the highways. With AI in the hands of the rich and powerful, this difference will no longer be merely between a bicycle and a car but will be akin to the difference between a bicycle and a rocket. People with access to modern technology equipped with AI know how powerful and efficient it is in performing tasks.

Education, as the only mechanism that gives hope to millions of people in India to gain social mobility and break the chains of poverty and deprivation, will play a key role in shaping the accelerated inequality in the future. Only 52% of the Indian population has access to the internet. When we look at schools with internet facilities, it is only 34%, and if we expand further, only 24.2% of government schools have access to internet facilities. We do not have enough data available to understand what percentage of students in India have started utilizing artificial intelligence to support their learning, but by looking at the data about internet access, we can understand that a significant percentage of students are far from accessing AI technology.

There is no doubt that people with resources will harness the full benefits of AI in accelerating their learning. The combination of socio-economic and cultural capital with artificial intelligence will prove lethal and may create a class that appears to be from a different world. Technological advancement does not take a backward step. This means we cannot rule out the use of artificial intelligence in education for egalitarian purposes. What we actually need is accelerated intervention from the government to equip each school and possibly each child with internet-enabled technology so that they do not feel left behind.

Does AI have the solution for this problem of accessibility? Perhaps not. We need a clear-cut and focused policy intervention that expedites the process of connecting each school in India to the internet; only then will AI have a role. Internet access to schools is like the highways on which AI can travel. The delay may cost heavily and could lead to a situation that may create social unrest.