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How Ideathons in government schools are closing India's skill gap before it widens
This article is authored by Rishi Mazumdar & Md Azim ud Doula, Quest Alliance.
When asked what a perfect school looked like, a ninth-grade student from a government school in Odisha took a blank white page, sat with his friend, and drew everything they wanted – a playground, a library, a dining hall, a swimming pool, dance class, a park, and a bicycle stand. In one corner, a classroom. Their imagination had more play and less study. What this fourteen-year-old had drawn was probably a rejection of how learning was shown to them. A system that had reduced learning to a single room, and therefore a single way of measuring success in exams, jobs, and life.
The world this student will graduate into looks nothing like the one that school has prepared them for. A war in Europe disrupted global food supply chains overnight. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing what work means faster than any curriculum committee can respond. The defining characteristic of the future is that it will be uncertain in ways we cannot fully anticipate or script answers for. By 2030, only 47% of Indian school graduates are projected to have the basic skills to be employable.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 shows that employers are demanding analytical thinking, creative thinking, resilience, systems thinking, and technological literacy as the fastest-rising essential competencies. Nearly 39% of core job skills are expected to change by 2030. Young people need the confidence to ask questions when there are no answer keys, to identify what is broken around them, to collaborate across differences, and to try to build their way forward even when the path is unclear.
Here is an equity question: which young people are being prepared for this future, and which are not?
Students in well-resourced private schools debate, prototype, fail, and try again. Design thinking labs, Model UN conferences, robotics clubs, and entrepreneurship electives are built into their school years. Their curriculum assumes that thinking, questioning, and creating are as important as remembering. For government school students, the education system had one promise constantly echoed: reproduce the right answer and the rest will fall in place. That may have worked in the past but does not anymore.
National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 called for a shift. It named experiential learning, critical thinking, and competency-based education as the direction Indian schooling must move in. It recognised that the purpose of school is to produce young people who can use knowledge to navigate the world. The gap between that vision and what happens in most government school classrooms remains wide.
Two national initiatives have tried to close that gap providing increasing opportunities in the government school ecosystem. Atal Tinkering Labs (ATL) brought makerspaces and innovation infrastructure into schools. INSPIRE MANAK created a national platform for student innovation. Both have done meaningful work. But ATLs are resource-intensive – equipment, space, dedicated staff – and remain limited to a relatively small number of schools. INSPIRE MANAK, as a scheme, creates a destination for innovation but does not always provide the structured process that gets students there. A student cannot submit a prototype to INSPIRE MANAK if no one has taught them how to identify a problem worth solving in the first place.
This is the gap that ideathons and hackathons, when embedded properly into government school systems, are designed to fill. We spent about two decades working at the intersection of government school education and youth employability in India reaching over 1.4 million learners across more than 10,000 schools and training 40,000 teachers. During this time, we have worked with teachers and students from the tribal belt of Odisha and Gujarat, from the remote coastal villages of Andhra Pradesh, from the social welfare department’s residential schools in Karnataka, and santhali speaking students from Jharkhand.
In the last five years, students from these geographies studying in government schools have been participating in Ideathons and Hackathons, Hack to the Future, facilitated by the teachers who were trained by Quest Alliance in collaboration with the Department of Education in 5 states. These students are identifying problems from their own lives, tracing those problems to their root causes, and building solutions.
On the third day of Hack to the Future in Bengaluru last year, a group of learners from a government school in Odisha huddled over a cardboard model of their village. They were debating whether an Internet of Things (IoT) sensor should sit near the handpump or the school gate. Their prototype was a low-cost water quality alert system, built to address contamination that had made families in their village ill the previous summer.
Five girl students from a government school in Andhra Pradesh chose to address menstrual health in a way that provided a safe space for girls who experienced menstruation for the first time, a space to clarify doubts, share their concerns without fear of judgement or shame. They conducted user research, identified gaps in existing tools, and built a working application that tracks cycles, monitors health indicators, and guides users on the various questions they have. When their research showed the problem extended beyond a single gender, they redesigned the platform to be more inclusive.
Concerned about the stagnant water accumulating in the tanks of her village over a period of time, Devyanshiben Rajubhai Patel, an eighth standard student from Gujarat, and her team designed a Smart Water Pump System – an automated filtration process to clean the water and the tanks, and making it fit for daily use and agriculture.
Another group of eighth standard students built MOO CARE, an IoT-based system to track cattle health and location, because one student wanted to solve a problem her mother faced every morning. She had no prior exposure to IoT. She learned it because the problem demanded it. The project was documented by MIT, on their global MIT App Inventor platform.
Hackathons and ideathons work by reorienting the classroom around a different starting point. Students observe their own lives, name what is unfair or broken, trace a problem to its root cause, then build and test a solution with others. For many of these students, children of farmers and daily-wage workers, girls in residential schools far from home, first-generation learners from tribal districts, this is the first time a teacher has asked them to treat their own observation as a form of knowledge.
A common assumption in education reform is that government school teachers are barriers to change. The evidence we have from five states suggests otherwise.
A teacher in Odisha described it plainly. Before the training, she did not know how to help students think beyond the textbook. Now they come to her with problems she had not thought about herself. One student identified a water contamination issue in her village that the local administration had not mapped.
This is also what NEP 2020 asks of Indian classrooms. It requires teachers trained to facilitate inquiry, and a syllabus anchored around observation and problem-solving, not just recall. Hackathons and ideathons offer a tested model for this: structured teacher capacity building paired with a classroom process that puts NEP's vision into practice.
With a clear facilitation framework, structured training, and ongoing support including a simple chatbot that helps teachers track progress and ask for help when stuck, government school teachers adopt this process and sustain it. These students may not become entrepreneurs. They may not take their prototypes to the market. They will go back home, back to their classrooms, back to the rhythms of ordinary life.
But they will go back knowing that they can ask a question that matters. That they can look at a problem in their village, their home, their community, and not wait for someone else to solve it. For young people who have spent their school lives being told what to think and when to speak, that is a significant shift. It is the sense of agency a student will carry into whatever life they build.
What that ninth-grade student drew was a school where his curiosity had a place and a world worth paying attention to. Ten lakh government schools in India are full of students like him. The model exists, has been tested, and is ready. The next step is making it available to every government school student as a matter of course.
The question for policymakers, curriculum designers, and education departments is direct: if the future we are preparing our learners for is uncertain, interconnected, and rapidly changing, what will it take to make our curriculum and pedagogy match that reality? Not for the few students in well-resourced schools. For all 127 million of them.
This article is authored by Rishi Mazumdar & Md Azim ud Doula, Quest Alliance.
