Assessing the AI Readiness Gap in Indian Education

This systematic review focuses on the present level of Artificial Intelligence (AI) preparedness of the Indian education system and its role in the students’ and teachers’ preparedness in the school to higher education transition period. The review covers the infrastructural, cognitive, and pedagogical aspects through rigorous methods that can be reproduced. In accordance with PRISMA, academic and policy databases were searched to find the studies released between 2013 and 2025. The results reveal the presence of significant digital access disparities, teacher training disparities, and curriculum implementation disparities, especially in rural and disadvantaged communities. These findings are synthesized in the review into the Human–AI-centric Conceptual Framework, which suggests that AI readiness is not a direct consequence of technological access but a pedagogical process, mediated by technological access. As the current review mentions, whereas courses related to AI have already been introduced in the school and higher education levels, school education is still underperforming in regard to its depth, continuity, and inclusivity, which poses an implementation and preparedness gap. Some of the recommendations are better training for teachers, alignment of the curriculum, and infrastructural upgrades. The review also underscores the increasing divide between the policy-level suggestions, which are contained in NEP 2020 and NCF 2023, and the real-life difficulties of addressing them at the grassroots level, which are explained by a range of factors that are described in the article.