For the past several weeks, New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar has been filled with youth. They call themselves the “Cockroach People’s Party”βa name once used as an insult, but which they have turned into a symbol of their identity and resistance. Their movement isn’t against just one leaked question paper; it’s against the entire education system.
The NEET exam was canceled and re-conducted following allegations of a paper leak. Irregularities were also alleged in CBSE’s on-screen evaluation system. Over the past decade, there have been more than a hundred paper leak incidents, affecting the futures of millions of students. Tear gas was fired at teenagers peacefully protesting with the Constitution in hand. This scene alone should be signal enough for policymakers that this isn’t mere anger over administrative lapsesβit’s a generation’s rebellion against a system built on rote memorization, a single day’s exam, and promises of limited government jobs.
The central government’s first response will likely be the same again: a new proctoring system to prevent leaks, a more secure question bank, or the exit of a few officials. But that would be the biggest mistake. These protests are just symptoms; the disease runs much deeper.
India’s exam culture is still a relic of that industrial age, when a single exam, on a single day, with a single result could determine a young person’s entire life. Yet today’s economy demands jobs that seek adaptability, decision-making skills, and the ability to work with AI toolsβnone of which are tested for, nor systematically taught.
If India wants to understand what the education of the future should look like, it must carefully examine the diverse models emerging around the world.
Two Models, One Crossroads
China has embraced AI not as an elective subject, but as the foundation of its education infrastructure. Under its national “AI+ Education” initiative, launched as part of the 15th Five-Year Plan in 2026, AI literacy becomes mandatory from primary school onward, with a goal of developing a fully integrated AI education system by 2030.
This isn’t just policyβit’s ground reality. By the end of 2025, Beijing claimed that nearly 88 percent of its schools had begun using AI. In cities like Shenzhen, students receive at least one AI-focused lesson every month. In a Beijing secondary school, AI analyzes weeks of homework and quizzes to identify students’ weaknesses and generates personalized practice exercises, which teachers refine and implement.
China’s stated goal isn’t for students to blindly trust AI, but to learn to use it like a co-pilotβa tool whose advice they scrutinize, verify, and challenge when necessary.
In contrast, America has taken a more decentralized, market-driven path. It’s promoting AI research at the federal level, industry-education partnerships, and teacher training, but implementation varies across states and districts.
In America, the debate around AI in education remains largely defensive, focused on catching cheating and maintaining academic integrity. A uniform national strategy for teaching AI as a life skill hasn’t yet materialized.
The strength of this model is its flexibility and freedom for innovation, but its biggest weakness is that it widens the gap between resource-rich and resource-poor schools.
India, for now, isn’t moving in either direction. Here, an “exam industry” has taken root, where high-stakes tests like NEET, JEE, and UPSC have become gateways to limited opportunities. A massive coaching industry has sprung up around them, extracting a heavy financial toll from families so their children can prepare for that one day’s exam.