This is a truly fascinating time to be an educator, particularly in India.
During the past year, in India, the first batch of universities that adopted the new, four-year undergraduate programme under the National Education Policy 2020 scheme (I belong to one such university) welcomed its first-ever fourth year. India continued a string of rapid strides in technological development in the international arena. And worldwide, large language model-driven AI tools challenged every aspect of education as we know it, with widespread disruption in Indian institutions at all levels.
Unusually for Indian university education, this final year has the option of an original research thesis. This has been a practice that has been followed at a handful of elite institutions such as IITs and IISERs for a while now, but now, for the first time, all universities in the country adopting the NEP are asked to implement this option.
The most immediate shift of 2025 was the beginning of the dust settling on the wide range of issues that fall under the umbrella of ‘Artificial Intelligence’. For two years, academia oscillated between impetuously banning Generative AI and blindly embracing it. This year, we drifted to the middle path, that of the inevitable integration. The conversation moved from the doom and gloom of ‘Will AI replace us?’ to accepting the exploration of ‘How is AI useful for us?’
For the academic cohort of 2025, the change has been nothing short of revolutionary. We have watched undergraduates routinely use personalised AI tutors to bridge gaps in their foundational knowledge that might previously have caused them to drop out of STEM courses. We have seen them generate routine code to create visualisation and graphics, or summarise vast bibliographies, that would otherwise take far too long to be useful in semester assignments. Slowly but inexorably, AI has shown the capacity for pushing students up the cognitive ladder. In the coming years, they will no longer be graded on the capacity for retrieving information, but on curation, critique, debate and interpretation.
For teachers, the initial apprehension has broken conventional shackles, leaning towards pragmatism. They are discovering that the administrative burden that plagues academia, namely the unrelenting grading of standard assessments, scheduling, the rote paperwork, compilation of course materials — all of these can be offloaded to intelligent systems. In the past year, one has realised that this freed-up faculty time can be used for the one thing AI cannot simulate — personal mentorship. The lecture hall can now permanently become a ‘flipped classroom’. Students can consume the content (often AI-assisted) before class, and the classroom can become a theatre of discussion, debate, ethical reasoning, and collaborative problem-solving. We can now teach students to drive these powerful engines, not merely be the passengers.
At the same time, in keeping with the changes ushered in by the NEP 2020, Indian higher education is poised for perhaps the most significant structural reform in decades. The move to replace the University Grants Commission, All India Council for Technical Education and the National Council for Teacher Education under a single regulatory body, the Higher Education Commission of India, which is now dealt with under the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill 2025.
This is much more than an administrative shuffle — the Bill takes education funding away from the control of the regulator and proposes a commission with a radically different structure. For too long, Indian education was bisected into ‘technical’ and ‘general’ streams, a binary that made little sense in a world where a biologist needs coding skills and an engineer needs ethics. The unified regulator promises to dissolve these artificial boundaries. By streamlining the approval processes and focusing on light regulation, one anticipates a significant reduction in the compliance burden that often stifles innovation.
For a university administrator, the prospect could be liberating. It implies a shift from inspection-based governance to disclosure-based governance. In 2026, this should translate into faster curriculum updates, easier collaboration between IITs and liberal arts universities, and a more fluid movement of credits. One hopes that the Academic Bank of Credits will truly come into its own under this unified umbrella, allowing students to weave together degrees that are as unique as their own aspirations.
As for students, before they enter universities, there are many key changes that are emerging. For example, the Central Board of Secondary Education has decided to hold two rounds of the Class X exams — this will start in 2026. Several state boards have already implemented a similar scheme, notably West Bengal in its higher secondary curriculum. This may radically change the way university admissions are carried out in the future and the kind of subjects the students take up after school.
2025 was also the year the world came to India, and India went to the world with renewed confidence. The regulations allowing top-tier foreign universities to set up campuses on Indian soil are beginning to bear fruit, laying the seeds for an ecosystem of competition and collaboration. This is also about the internationalisation of Indian pedagogy as university curricula look far and wide to make their courses compatible with those elsewhere in the world.
At Ashoka, and across the peer group of forward-looking institutions, we are seeing a surge in the notion of internationalisation at home. A student in Sonipat can now work in real time on a climate change project with a peer in Melbourne and another in Singapore. Furthermore, we are increasingly becoming a destination for the Global South. Students from Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Middle East are looking to India for high-quality, affordable education that is culturally intelligible to them. 2026 will likely see this trend accelerate, turning our campuses into true melting pots of global culture, vital for developing the global citizenship envisaged by the NEP.
Perhaps the most intangible yet profound shift in 2025 came not from the classroom but from the stars as the first Indian, modern-day astronaut visited the International Space Station via Axiom-4. When Shubhanshu Shukla docked with the ISS, it did something to the psychology of the Indian student. For decades, cutting-edge research was something that happened elsewhere. Today, our students see Indian scientists and pilots at the frontier of human exploration. This has a cascading effect on higher education. We are seeing a marked increase in interest in pure sciences, astrophysics, and aerospace engineering, not just as career paths but as vocations of national pride.
This achievement has validated the ‘research mindset’ we have been trying to cultivate. It proves to a 19-year-old in a chemistry lab that his/her work is part of a larger, successful, scientific ecosystem. It bridges the gap between the abstract theory of the textbook and the visceral reality of technological prowess. As we move into 2026, universities must capitalise on this enthusiasm by fostering more ‘mission-mode’ research, linking student projects to national goals in space, defence, and sustainability.
As we look to the future, the contours of 2026 are clear. It will be a year of consolidation. The regulatory frameworks are falling into place; the technology is maturing; the global connections are active. We must ensure that the benefits of this high-tech, flexible, and globalised education system are based on the principles of equity, are not restricted to islands of excellence but permeate the vast enclave of colleges and universities across the nation.
Education is, ultimately, an act of hope. It is a belief that the future can be better than the past. At the start of 2026, buoyed by the integration of AI, the promise of better opportunities and more efficient governance of higher education, and the inspiration of our astronauts, that hope feels more tangible than ever. We are building a system where an Indian student can study the classics, code an algorithm, and dream of Mars, all within the same semester. That is a future worth working for.
Somak Raychaudhury is Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Physics, Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana. All opinions are personal