An Indian student can use ChatGPT to write an essay, summarise a textbook, draft a policy brief, solve a mathematical problem, generate computer code, or explain Aristotle and Ambedkar in a matter of seconds. That single fact should make every university administrator, policymaker, and teacher pause. Not because students might cheat. Rather, because artificial intelligence has exposed a far more unsettling question. If information is now available instantly and almost freely, what exactly is the purpose of higher education?
For decades, India’s education debate has revolved around familiar concerns. We have worried about rote learning, employability, rankings, accreditation, infrastructure, faculty shortages, research output, digitalisation, and global competitiveness. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 was conceived as an ambitious response to many of these challenges. It sought to move away from rigid disciplinary silos and examination-centred learning towards flexibility, multidisciplinary education, critical thinking, creativity, and holistic development.
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These are worthy goals. Indeed, few education reforms in independent India have possessed such breadth of vision. Yet six years into its implementation, a difficult question deserves attention. What if the greatest weakness of Indian higher education is not curricular, administrative, or technological? What if it is relational? What if we have spent decades reforming educational structures while largely neglecting educational relationships?
Higher education reforms
The irony is striking. Almost every major reform in higher education focuses on systems. We debate credit frameworks, institutional restructuring, assessment mechanisms, international collaborations, digital platforms, funding models, and governance arrangements. NEP 2020 itself contains detailed proposals on institutional architecture and academic flexibility. But one factor repeatedly escapes serious scrutiny: the quality of interaction between teachers and students.
This omission matters because the most consequential outcomes of education are rarely structural. A university can mandate multidisciplinary learning. It cannot mandate intellectual curiosity. It can introduce flexible curricula. It cannot manufacture wisdom. It can create pathways for mobility. It cannot guarantee mentorship. Yet mentorship may be the most important educational resource of all.
The dominant assumption behind many contemporary reforms is that educational improvement follows institutional redesign. Change the curriculum, alter assessment methods, restructure institutions, and better outcomes will emerge. There is truth in this proposition. Poor systems can certainly undermine learning. But a growing body of educational experience suggests that structures alone rarely produce excellence.
History offers a useful reminder. The educational traditions that shaped civilisations were built not merely around content but around relationships. Socrates did not become influential because he possessed exclusive information. His significance lay in the way he challenged his students to think. Plato inherited that intellectual method and transformed it into philosophy. Aristotle expanded it further and later educated Alexander. Whether one admires or criticises the outcomes, the influence of this chain of mentorship on world history is difficult to overstate.
India possesses equally powerful examples. Historical traditions associate Chanakya with the political education of Chandragupta Maurya and the emergence of one of the subcontinent’s most consequential empires. Ramakrishna shaped Vivekananda’s intellectual and spiritual outlook before the latter took Indian thought to global audiences. Gandhi repeatedly acknowledged Gopal Krishna Gokhale as a formative mentor whose influence extended beyond politics to questions of public ethics and civic duty. History usually remembers the student. Civilisations depend on the teacher. This distinction has profound implications for contemporary India.
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Much of the discussion surrounding higher education today is framed through the language of skills. Universities are expected to produce employable graduates. Courses are judged by placement statistics. Institutions are evaluated through measurable outputs. Governments understandably seek returns on public investment. Students and parents, facing rising costs and economic uncertainty, naturally demand career outcomes.
None of this is unreasonable. The problem arises when employability becomes the primary lens through which education is understood. A nation can train workers. A civilisation must cultivate successors. The difference is not semantic. It is foundational. Workers perform tasks. Successors inherit responsibilities. Workers fill positions. Successors sustain institutions. Workers contribute to economic growth. Successors determine whether a society’s values, knowledge systems, and public culture survive from one generation to the next.
This broader function of education receives surprisingly little attention in public debate. The language of policy increasingly revolves around innovation, entrepreneurship, start-ups, workforce readiness, and technological adaptation. These priorities are important, particularly for a country seeking developed-nation status by 2047. Yet no society becomes truly developed merely by producing skilled labour.
A developed society also requires ethical public servants, thoughtful judges, responsible scholars, principled business leaders, competent administrators, committed teachers, and informed citizens. Such individuals are not produced through coursework alone. They are shaped through relationships.
This is where the AI revolution becomes especially revealing. Artificial intelligence functions as a stress test for educational systems. Institutions built primarily around information delivery suddenly appear vulnerable because information delivery is precisely what machines increasingly excel at. A chatbot can explain concepts, answer questions, generate summaries, and provide personalised responses more efficiently than many traditional educational processes. However, mentorship remains beyond its reach. A machine can produce information.
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It cannot recognise latent potential in a struggling student. It cannot inspire intellectual courage. It cannot model integrity. It cannot transmit a sense of responsibility towards society or future generations. In this sense, artificial intelligence has not created a crisis of education. It has exposed one.
For years, universities quietly drifted towards transactional models of learning. Students became consumers. Teachers became service providers. Degrees became products. Educational quality was increasingly evaluated through metrics that could be counted, ranked, measured, and audited. The difficulty is that what matters most in education often resists measurement. Credits can be counted. Infrastructure can be audited. Rankings can be published. Mentorship cannot be easily quantified.
Yet the teacher who identifies promise in an uncertain student may contribute more to society than an entire collection of performance indicators. The conversation that changes a young person’s ambitions rarely appears in institutional dashboards. The mentor who instils intellectual discipline leaves no easily measurable trace. The teacher who transmits a sense of public purpose generates outcomes that may only become visible decades later.
The central weakness of contemporary educational reform, including aspects of NEP implementation, is its tendency to prioritise what can be measured over what truly matters. Policymakers understandably focus on enrolments, employability, research output, infrastructure, and institutional performance. These indicators are necessary. But they are not sufficient. The ultimate test of an educational system is not whether it produces more credentials. It is whether it produces people capable of assuming responsibility for the future.
NEP 2020 may ultimately succeed in transforming the architecture of Indian higher education. It may improve flexibility, expand opportunities, and encourage intellectual breadth. These achievements would be significant. But architecture alone is not enough. The future of Indian education will depend on a question no policy document can answer by itself: who will prepare the next generation to inherit the responsibilities of a developed India?
For two centuries, universities derived authority from controlling access to knowledge. Artificial intelligence has ended that monopoly forever. The institutions that flourish in the coming decades will not be those that compete with machines in producing information. They will be those that rediscover a much older purpose. Not producing answers. Producing successors.
India’s challenge in the age of AI is therefore not merely educational. It is civilisational. For societies rarely decline because knowledge disappears. They decline when one generation loses the ability to prepare the next.