The first bell has not yet rung at a zilla parishad school in rural Maharashtra, and Sunita tai has already worn four hats. She has unlocked the classroom, signed the midday-meal register, calmed a crying first-grader, and is now facing a single room that holds three grades at once. Forty minutes to teach fractions. She loves this work. She is also, quietly, exhausted by it.
Sunita tai is one of nearly nine million schoolteachers in India, a workforce among the largest and most diverse in the world. They teach in more than 1.4 million schools, from well-equipped city campuses to single-teacher classrooms in rural areas. All of school education rests on their shoulders. How we prepare and support these teachers is, in a very real sense, how we prepare the country itself.
NEP 2020 places teachers at the heart of reform and assures every teacher fifty hours of continuous professional development each year, and the National Curriculum Framework echoes that ambition. Globally, UNESCO's ICT Competency Framework for Teachers spells out what digital fluency in the classroom should look like, and its newer AI Competency Framework for Teachers, released in 2024, goes further, setting out fifteen competencies that ask teachers not only to use AI, but to question it, guide it, and keep human judgement firmly at the centre. Training is imparted through workshops, through cascade models that pass learning down a chain of trainers, through online certification, and through platforms such as DIKSHA that place courses directly on a teacher's phone.
Ask Sunita tai about her last training and her face lights up. At the two-day workshop, she learnt something real, met other teachers, came back with ideas she was eager to try. That spark is precious; every good workshop plants a seed. However, there was no follow-up. Nobody visited her classroom to see whether the new method survived contact with 35 students. Daily routines and administrative duties resumed. The spark dwindled, her enthusiasm waned. This is a systemic gap that needs to be bridged. Teacher training is the start of a learning journey that can open doors--not just for the teacher, but for all her wards; in fact, for generations of students to whom she will disseminate her knowledge, learnings, insights.
{{/usCountry}}Ask Sunita tai about her last training and her face lights up. At the two-day workshop, she learnt something real, met other teachers, came back with ideas she was eager to try. That spark is precious; every good workshop plants a seed. However, there was no follow-up. Nobody visited her classroom to see whether the new method survived contact with 35 students. Daily routines and administrative duties resumed. The spark dwindled, her enthusiasm waned. This is a systemic gap that needs to be bridged. Teacher training is the start of a learning journey that can open doors--not just for the teacher, but for all her wards; in fact, for generations of students to whom she will disseminate her knowledge, learnings, insights.
{{/usCountry}}This is where Artificial Intelligence (AI) can shape teacher training and development, in a meaningful manner. Instead of an occasional workshop, AI can meet a teacher where she is, year-round. A short lesson on her phone in her own lingo, say, Marathi; a patient assistant that answers her doubts even after school hours; adaptive practice that adjusts to her current capacity and skill level and is dynamic and responsive to her individual needs. She can rehearse a difficult class with a simulated group of students and get gentle feedback before she faces her real students. She can deploy AI to draft an assessment, translate a Science passage or build real-life examples from what her students know, like the local market or the weekend cricket score, to energise classroom participation. By using AI to automate administrative tasks, lesson planning and assessments, she can spend more time engaging with her pupils. Clearing doubts, strengthening problem-solving and cognitive abilities, nourishing the spirit of inquiry, exploration and discovery, she can devote more time, expertise and energy to nurture students’ academic and all-round development.
But the caution matters as much as the promise. AI should make Sunita tai stronger, more confident, more creative; never make her smaller or less relevant, nor make her more dependent. The rules must be simple and clear: protect her data, explain how the tools work, and keep the teacher as the decision-maker. Recognising teachers as the architects of learning outcomes, embracing and empowering teacher autonomy, are at the heart of AI as an enabler of teacher capacity building and its indubitably widespread ripple effect.
Encouragingly, multiple geographies across the country are taking up the gauntlet. Maharashtra SCERT is launching a foundational AI Literacy course for all teachers. Punjab has become the first state to roll out an AI curriculum across its government schools. Odisha's AI Policy of 2025 sets a decade-long path to take AI learning, in Odia and tribal languages, to most of its schools. Andhra Pradesh, under its LEAP programme, is bringing AI-enabled assessment into government classrooms, opening AI, STEM and robotics labs, and using a single app to cut teachers' paperwork. Tamil Nadu's TN SPARK programme is taking AI, coding and robotics to Classes 6-9 in around 3,000 government schools, training Maths and Science teachers and providing bilingual textbooks in Tamil and English. Goa, through its SCERT, has begun folding AI into teacher training and its school technology curriculum. At the national level, from 2026-27, AI is set to enter classrooms, Class 3 onwards, with millions of teachers to be trained through NISHTHA, the government's flagship programme, alongside the SCERTs.
Blending in-person training with self-paced learning, on-ground support for hands-on usage and practice of AI tools, and structured follow-ups, we can use AI to scale teacher training and development. But scale alone is not the goal. To build confidence, AI must evolve into a trustworthy companion. Accompanying the teacher into her classroom with ethics, inclusivity, fairness, facilitating good teaching practices and genuine respect for the teacher, AI can redefine teacher and school leader capacity at the last mile.
Sunita tai will not be replaced by a machine. But she might, at last, be supported by one. The regulated use of AI will equip teachers with the resources and skills required to address evolving educational needs and diverse learners.
And future generations will continue to be moulded, the foundations of their academic and personal growth established by a steadfast, skilful stalwart of a teacher… who, after 35 years of teaching eager young minds and naive hopefuls, still looks forward to the school morning bell.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Ganesh Raja, CEO, Kotak Education Foundation, Mumbai.