A student can spend an entire day studying and still have very little time to think. School in the morning, coaching in the evening, homework at night, a test tomorrow and an assignment due next week. From the outside, it looks like commitment. From the student’s side, it can feel like moving from one deadline to another. Somewhere along the way, education has acquired a strange equation: a busy student must be a serious student. But what if being constantly occupied is sometimes getting in the way of actually learning?

It is normal to feel stuck here. Learning takes work, and adults can easily notice the work part. An assignment gets finished. A sheet gets counted. Study time can be written down. Test results can be lined up and compared. What is harder to spot is real understanding. Did the student dig in, ask questions, link the topic to something else, or start using the idea on their own?

Because of this, some students get skilled at “showing effort”. They hand in proof that they did the steps. Yet they may not have had enough time to reach what learning needs. They are busy, but the deeper part can still be missing.

This is not really about homework, coaching, or clubs. Those things can help. Practice can firm up a concept. Coaching can offer extra help when school gets unclear. Activities beyond class can grow confidence, routine, and new interests. The trouble starts when doing tasks is treated as the same thing as progress. A student wraps up one job and jumps right to the next. Then another. Before long, the packed day starts to feel like success. 

But more completed work does not always mean more understanding. One student might spend an hour wrestling with a tough idea and learn more from that struggle than another student who spends four hours running through tasks. The second student may keep going without pausing to ask if any of it actually fits.

There is a psychological reason this culture is so difficult to escape. Students quickly notice what adults reward. If being constantly occupied is treated as ambition, they begin to associate exhaustion with achievement. If the first question after school is, “How much did you study today?” rather than, “What did you understand today?”, the number of hours gradually becomes more important than the quality of those hours. And when every free afternoon is filled with another class, course, test or competition, having nothing scheduled can begin to feel like falling behind. A child can slowly learn to measure progress by how tired they are.

Some pressure can change how students feel about what they like. A hobby may turn into a box to tick. A contest can turn into a mark that sits on a page. Even reading can start to feel like a task with a result at the end. Curiosity itself can get shaped by the need to perform. Students may pick things because they believe it will help with getting in or make them seem more capable. From the outside, it may look like a student is highly driven. But at times, they are just good at hitting what others want.

This matters because some of the most important parts of learning do not look productive. Understanding a difficult concept can require sitting with confusion. Solving a problem may involve getting it wrong several times. Creativity often begins when there is no immediate instruction about what to do next. A student may spend an afternoon reading about something outside the syllabus, exploring an unusual question or attempting a project that fails completely. None of these experiences necessarily produces a certificate, a completed worksheet or a higher test score. Yet they can develop something far more valuable: the ability to think independently.

Not every empty hour is wasted time. Some of it is where thinking begins.

Schools and parents need to recognise one important difference: keeping children busy is not the same as helping them think and learn. A classroom can be full of activity without students engaging deeply with an idea. A timetable can be perfectly organised without leaving enough space for curiosity, questions or independent thought.

For parents, this is tough because they feel real pressure. Places like good schools, good colleges, and strong jobs matter a lot. Many families want their children to be ready. When a new coaching class is added, it can feel like extra safety. Another test can feel like more help. Yet a free afternoon can seem like time lost. Still, there is a line. After that line, “more prep” may not add much. A new worksheet does not always mean deeper understanding. Another test does not always build a new skill.

Children need preparation for the future, but they also need enough space to become the people who will live that future.

The same question applies to schools. If students spend most of their time completing prescribed tasks, when do they learn to decide what is worth exploring? If every problem comes with a method, when do they learn to find their own? If every mistake is corrected immediately, when do they learn to sit with uncertainty and work their way through it? The world outside school will not always provide a syllabus, four answer choices or a teacher explaining what comes next. Students will eventually face problems that have never appeared in a textbook.

That is why education should not simply ask how much work a student has completed. It should ask what that work has changed… Did the student understand something today that they did not understand yesterday? Did they learn to solve a problem without being shown the method? Did they discover a question they had never thought about before? Did they make a mistake and understand why it happened? These are harder things to measure, but they are much closer to the meaning of learning.

The goal should not be to push students less. It should not be to take away all structure. Discipline still matters, practice still matters, getting ready still matters.  But learning is what outweighs it all.

Yet a packed timetable should not decide who is a good student. When schools chase productivity more and more, we should pause. Kids are not tools that improve by the count of tasks finished. They are learners. Learning can take time. Some of that time does not fit into a scoreboard.

Perhaps the better question at the end of a school day is not, “How much did you finish?” It is “What can you understand now that you could not understand before?”

If the answer is something meaningful, the day was productive, even if the notebook is not full, the calendar has a gap and nothing was added to a résumé. Because the purpose of education was never to create the busiest students in the room; it was to give them enough knowledge, confidence and curiosity to think when nobody is telling them what to do next.

India can land a spacecraft on the Moon and still mistake freezer ice for a divine visitation. The next science mission is not only to communicate achievements, but to build citizens who can question, verify and use technology without surrendering judgment.

A freezer, a foot bath, and a warning

In July 2026, an ordinary household refrigerator in Agra became an extraordinary destination. An ice formation inside the freezer took on a shape that some residents read as a Shivling. News spread, people arrived, flowers and belpatra were offered, water was poured in jalabhishek, and devotional chants filled a private home. The reports also recorded the obvious alternative explanation: freezing conditions had produced a naturally formed shape. No religious authority had authenticated it. No laboratory was needed to see the basic fact. Ice can take suggestive forms.

The episode would be comic if it ended as a neighbourhood curiosity. It becomes revealing when a resemblance is promoted into a revelation before anyone asks the simplest question: what else could explain this?

That question has become increasingly important in a country where faith, technology and digital misinformation now intersect in powerful ways. Recent incidents offer uncomfortable reminders. In Pune, videos surfaced showing women followers of self-styled godman Radhamohan Mishra washing his feet and drinking milk poured over them, amid a police investigation into allegations of exploitation and psychological manipulation at an ashram. In late 2024, visitors at Vrindavan's Banke Bihari temple were filmed drinking water dripping from an elephant-shaped outlet as charan amrit. Reports later identified it as air-conditioning discharge, yet some continued despite warnings.

These are not interchangeable incidents. A freezer is not an ashram, reverence is not coercion, and a viral video is not a completed investigation. But together they raise a larger question: why does a society that celebrates scientific achievement sometimes suspend ordinary standards of evidence when a claim is wrapped in sanctity, charisma or collective excitement?

The answer cannot simply be that Indians are irrational or that religion is the enemy. That conclusion is both simplistic and unhelpful. The harder truth is that India has become remarkably effective at communicating science when there is a mission, a government programme, a public benefit or a spectacular event. It has been less successful at developing the everyday civic habit of asking: How do we know? What do we not know? Who is accountable? And what happens if the claim is wrong?

In an era of deepfakes, generative AI, miracle cures, climate stress and mass digital persuasion, this is no longer merely a cultural concern. It is a public-safety issue.

Faith is not on trial. Unaccountable certainty is.

Article 51A(h) of the Constitution calls upon citizens to develop scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform. Scientific temper does not require anyone to abandon prayer, ritual or imagination. It requires claims about health, safety, nature, public policy and human rights to remain open to evidence and correction.

A person can find meaning in a sacred symbol and still know that frost is frost. A family can respect a guru while refusing an unsafe medical treatment. The real dividing line is not between the religious and the secular. It is between meaning and manipulation, private devotion and public harm, humility before mystery and unquestioning obedience to someone claiming immunity from scrutiny.

The hierarchy normalised by some godman practices is particularly disturbing. When a leader's body is presented as a source of healing or supernatural authority, followers can gradually surrender dignity, bodily autonomy and medical judgment. Maharashtra reported cases in 2025 involving a self-styled godman accused of violent and degrading practices in the name of exorcism. In Damoh, an OBC man was allegedly forced to wash a Brahmin man's feet and drink the water as atonement after an AI-generated image triggered a caste dispute; the Madhya Pradesh High Court took suo motu cognisance.

The stakes can become catastrophic. The 2024 Hathras stampede killed 121 people at a gathering associated with Bhole Baba, where the crowd vastly exceeded the permitted number. Such tragedies cannot be explained simply through ridicule of believers. Illness, insecurity, deprivation, discrimination, loneliness and the need for hope can all make charismatic figures attractive.

A humanist response therefore has to ask different questions: Who profits from vulnerability? Where are safe alternatives? Why are public institutions absent when desperation arrives?

India already knows how to make science visible

India has a rich science-communication inheritance. CSIR's popular-science initiatives, Vigyan Pragati, science museums, radio, mobile exhibitions, NCSTC, university outreach, community radio and people's science movements have repeatedly attempted to take knowledge beyond laboratories and examination halls.

Public-health campaigns offer another important lesson. Smallpox eradication, polio elimination, HIV/AIDS communication, immunisation drives and COVID-19 messaging demonstrated that communication works best when it is accompanied by delivery, trust, repetition and local engagement.

Polio did not succeed because of a single poster. It depended on house-to-house mobilisation, vaccine booths, surveillance, health workers, local leaders, repeated rounds and responses to rumours. People trusted the message partly because the service was physically present and there was someone nearby to answer questions.

India's space programme has made science equally visible. Aryabhata, Chandrayaan-1, the Mars Orbiter Mission, Chandrayaan-2, Chandrayaan-3, Aditya-L1 and XPoSat have transformed engineering and research into subjects of popular fascination. Chandrayaan-2 offered a public lesson in failure and iteration; Chandrayaan-3 demonstrated how software, materials, navigation, testing and teamwork can turn a difficult attempt into a successful landing.

Digital India demonstrates another form of technological adoption. UPI, DigiLocker, online public services and digital public infrastructure show that Indians can adopt complex technologies at enormous scale when those technologies are useful, supported and embedded in everyday life.

Yet admiration for science is not the same as scientific temper.

A person can admire a rocket, scan a QR code and use an AI assistant while still struggling to evaluate a health claim, interpret a graph, identify a manipulated video or question an automated decision.

The next challenge is therefore to turn admiration into reasoning.

The SWOT verdict: powerful, partial and precarious

India's greatest strength is its distributed scientific and educational infrastructure. DST-NCSTC, CSIR-NIScPR, NCSM, ISRO, ICMR, DBT, ICAR, universities, IISERs, museums and civil-society networks possess expertise, channels and institutional legitimacy. Science clubs, street theatre, demonstrations, jathas and local-language campaigns add a participatory tradition that cannot be created by central publicity alone.

The weakness lies in what gets celebrated. Public communication often focuses on what an institution has announced, launched or achieved. Achievement is important, but it can crowd out method, uncertainty, failure, independent verification, social costs and affected communities.

A rocket launch is visible. Calibration, data analysis and the labour behind it are not. A medical breakthrough makes a compelling headline. Sample size, adverse effects, cost, comparators and limitations are harder to explain.

This is where technology communication and science communication must be separated.

Technology communication teaches use. Science communication teaches judgment.

The gap is compounded by language inequality, rote learning, fragmented media coverage and weak professional pathways. The 2024 FAST India SciComm ThinkLabs report, based on a small, non-representative practitioner sample, found that 54 per cent of respondents had no formal training, while about 95 per cent used English in their current work.

India does not lack enthusiasm. It lacks continuity, translation, evaluation and safety.

The closure of Vigyan Prasar, completed in October 2024 following a Union Cabinet winding-up decision, makes the institutional question sharper. The lesson should not be to romanticise one organisation or create another official voice. It is that archives, networks, professional memory and public-interest communication can disappear unless they are deliberately protected.

Build scientific citizenship, not just science fans

India now has an opportunity to make scientific thinking a design requirement of public life.

Every major research or technology initiative should have two outcomes: the immediate service or achievement, and a lasting increase in the public's ability to question, verify, use safely and participate.

A Scientific Citizenship Charter for ministries, regulators, universities, schools, hospitals and publicly funded projects could require plain-language evidence, methods wherever possible, uncertainty, conflicts of interest, risks, consequences, public question logs and visible correction mechanisms.

Transparency should be treated as part of scientific excellence, not as an attack on institutional prestige.

The effort must also be local. Evidence translated into Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Hindi, Assamese or tribal languages is useful, but translation alone is insufficient. Communities need explanations in their own idiom, demonstrations, trusted facilitators and opportunities to respond.

Scientific citizenship grows when people investigate problems they can see: water quality, classroom heat, crop health, waste, disease, air pollution or biodiversity—and then watch institutions respond.

Make the classroom a laboratory for doubt

Scientific temper will not be created by slogans, National Science Day speeches or one-off AI-awareness programmes. It has to be practised until questioning becomes ordinary.

History can teach source criticism. Civics can examine evidence in public decisions. Geography can involve local mapping. Mathematics can teach estimation and uncertainty. Biology can address health, ecology and misinformation. Languages can teach argument and revision. Computer science can explore data, models, bias and human oversight.

The goal is not to make children recite the scientific method. It is to make them comfortable designing a fair test, explaining an anomaly, comparing sources and changing an answer when evidence demands it.

Teachers are central to this effort. They need continuing professional development, experiment kits, local datasets, libraries, mentors and the freedom to spend time on questions.

Assessment must also change. A polished AI-generated answer should not automatically score higher than a modest answer that shows where the student checked, doubted and reached a conclusion.

Projects can begin with local questions: Does shade reduce classroom heat? What is the quality of neighbourhood water? How does a vaccination rumour spread? What happens to a discarded phone?

Students can observe, measure, interview, test, analyse, present and revise. They learn that evidence is not an external authority. It is a shared practice.

Put the human being back in the AI loop

AI literacy must go beyond prompt-writing. Citizens need to understand when AI should be used, when it should not be used and who remains responsible after the system produces an answer.

A practical human-in-the-loop routine should be taught from school to the workplace: frame the question; check data and permissions; protect privacy; use AI for a bounded task; record the output; verify it against trusted sources; identify what the system could not establish; accept, revise, reject or escalate the result; disclose AI assistance; and identify the uncertainty or condition under which AI should not be used.

The principle applies everywhere.

In a newsroom, AI can transcribe while a journalist verifies. In government, a model can draft while a human preserves the record and answers an appeal. In medicine, education, law and welfare, people affected by automated decisions must have a way to understand the basis, correct an error and seek review.

Human-in-the-loop cannot mean a ceremonial human click after the machine has already decided. It means responsibility before, during and after the system acts.

The newest godman may not always appear on a stage. Sometimes he—or the illusion of omniscience—may arrive through a chat window.

Build a public-reasoning grid, not a propaganda machine

India needs a long-term National Mission for Scientific Temper and Public Reasoning, supported by an independent observatory. Its purpose should be coordination and capacity-building, not narrative control.

Such a mission could map existing assets, identify language and access gaps, fund independent evaluations, monitor misinformation, preserve scientific archives and publish an annual assessment of reasoning, trust, safety and equity.

The architecture should be federated. NCSTC can provide a backbone; NIScPR can strengthen research communication; NCSM can support hands-on learning. Universities, IISERs, state councils, community radio, civil-society organisations, journalists and creators can provide local capacity.

The media must also invest. A public-interest fund with editorial firewalls could support science, health, climate and technology journalism in regional languages. Newsrooms need access to primary papers and data, specialist training, expert networks, visible corrections and sufficient time for follow-up reporting.

A high-quality science story should answer six questions: What is the claim? What is the evidence? What remains uncertain? What are the limits? Who is affected? Where can people verify the information or seek help?

Climate and nature should run through this work. A heatwave story should include exposure, housing, work, cooling and health services. A river story should examine ecology, livelihoods, pollution, infrastructure and governance. An AI story should address data, labour, energy, water, privacy and recourse.

The question is no longer simply, “Does this technology work?” It must also be, “For whom, for how long, at what cost, and what happens after disposal?”

Protect those who ask inconvenient questions

Scientific temper cannot be a public duty if those who defend it are left vulnerable.

Narendra Dabholkar was murdered in Pune in 2013 after campaigning against exploitative superstition and black magic. A 2024 special-court conviction brought some accountability, but the larger lesson remains institutional: rationalist work requires protection, not applause after tragedy.

Anti-superstition efforts should bring together rationalist organisations, teachers, doctors, journalists, fact-checkers, psychologists, lawyers, police, public-health officials and community leaders. The response to harmful claims should identify the harm, explain the evidence, provide safer alternatives, connect vulnerable people to services and protect those willing to speak.

At the same time, the state must guard against another danger: a national scientific-temper mission becoming a censorship mechanism or AI monitoring becoming surveillance.

Pluralism, dissent, privacy, due process and independent evaluation are not obstacles to scientific temper. They are its conditions.

Stop counting applause. Measure agency.

India's communication system often counts events, impressions, clicks, downloads and views. These numbers have value, but they do not tell us whether citizens have become more capable.

A campaign with a million views and little change in understanding should not automatically outrank a local programme involving 5,000 people who can identify a rumour, demonstrate a method or demand a correction.

A National Scientific Temper and Public Reasoning Index could measure comprehension of evidence and uncertainty, source-checking, willingness to revise beliefs, calibrated trust, safe AI use and civic agency. It should also assess whether institutions answer questions, publish corrections and include affected communities.

Results should be examined across language, geography, gender, caste, disability, age, education and income. A national average can hide a thousand exclusions.

Progress is not louder applause for science. It is the ability to disagree without violence, reject a fraudulent cure, recognise a deepfake, ask a public office for evidence, appeal an automated decision, protect dignity and make choices within ecological limits.

The Agra freezer did not reveal a divine crisis. It revealed a civic one: how quickly resemblance can become certainty when a crowd, a camera and sacred vocabulary meet.

The answer should not be ridicule. India needs stronger institutions, better journalism, classrooms that reward questioning, public-health systems people can trust, local networks that can counter misinformation and a more honest relationship with uncertainty.

India has already demonstrated that it can communicate a polio campaign, a digital service and a lunar landing to millions. The next task is harder: communicating the method and the limits.

A rocket landing can give a nation a shared moment of wonder. Scientific citizenship can give it a shared capacity to decide.

That capacity must become ordinary—in the classroom, clinic, newsroom, village meeting, public office, family WhatsApp group and AI tab open at midnight.

The future of science communication in India will be determined not only by how brilliantly the country explains what it can build, but by whether its citizens can ask what is true, what is uncertain, who bears the risk and what must change.

In an age of blind faith and intelligent machines, that is not merely science communication. It is the infrastructure of freedom.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming education, but it is also forcing schools and universities to confront an uncomfortable question: what happens when the quality of a student’s output becomes better than the student’s actual understanding?

A learner today can produce a polished essay, solve a mathematical problem, write computer code or prepare an impressive presentation with AI assistance—sometimes before developing the reasoning that such work appears to demonstrate. The danger, therefore, is not simply cheating. It is something deeper: the artefact may outrun the learner.

The answer is neither to ban artificial intelligence nor to surrender education to it. The challenge is to build a human-led learning system in which AI expands access and capability while teachers and learners retain judgement, verification, responsibility and ownership. As Prof Ujjwal K. Chowdhury argues, the goal should not be less AI, but more learner.

AI undoubtedly has a place in education. It can translate difficult concepts, generate additional examples, provide practice questions, simulate debates and offer feedback without embarrassment or fatigue. For students struggling with language, accessibility or access to personalised support, these possibilities can be transformative. But convenience must not become substitution. When AI performs the thinking before the learner has made a genuine attempt, it can remove the productive struggle through which understanding is built.

Education needs friction. Students must still retrieve information, make predictions, attempt solutions, make mistakes, test assumptions and explain their reasoning. A correct answer is not necessarily evidence of learning. The real test is whether the learner can explain, defend and transfer an idea when the screen goes dark.

This is where the idea of the “human-in-the-loop” becomes crucial. Human involvement cannot mean a teacher merely approving an AI-generated final submission. The learner must remain involved before, during and after AI use. A simple principle can guide classrooms: human first, AI in the middle, human last.

The learner should begin by thinking independently—forming a question, making an attempt or outlining an idea. AI can then assist with hints, counterarguments, examples or feedback. But the final responsibility must return to the learner, who verifies the information, revises the work, explains the reasoning and demonstrates genuine understanding.

This approach also demands a rethinking of assessment. Educational institutions cannot spend the next decade endlessly trying to detect whether AI has touched an assignment. The more important question is: what evidence shows what a learner can actually do? Process logs, oral defences, practical demonstrations, live problem-solving and short micro-vivas may become more valuable than polished take-home submissions alone.

Teachers, too, must be recognised as more important—not less important—in the AI era. Their role is evolving from information providers to learning architects. AI may help automate repetitive work, but teachers remain uniquely capable of identifying misconceptions, understanding context, building confidence and deciding when a student needs challenge rather than another answer.

For India, the opportunity is significant. The principles of inquiry, experiential learning, problem-solving and competency-based education already align with the need for responsible AI integration. But technology must not deepen inequality. A sustainable AI-enabled education system must ensure that learning does not depend on expensive subscriptions, high-speed internet or perfect English.

The final measure of educational technology is simple. After AI has helped, can the learner still think independently, explain clearly, solve a new problem and act responsibly?

If the answer is yes, AI is strengthening education. If the answer is no, then the system may have produced better assignments while producing weaker learners.

The future of education should not belong to the machine that speaks the most fluently. It should belong to the learner who, with or without AI, still knows how to think.

India's student protests have entered a new phase. What began as anger over the cancellation of NEET-UG 2026 has expanded into a broader youth movement questioning examination systems, recruitment processes, policing and the everyday failures of public education. From Jantar Mantar to Jharkhand, Bihar and the school gate, young citizens are increasingly learning to turn protest into institutional pressure.

The Supreme Court's September 1 order has provided an important legal pause. Invoking Article 142, the Court directed that FIRs registered across India in connection with protest incidents between July 20 and 25 should be closed and barred fresh FIRs concerning those incidents. The relief is not a blanket declaration of innocence: the Court permitted the Centre and Delhi Police to register a fresh FIR concerning 2,873 people identified as having serious criminal antecedents, limited to allegations involving bodily harm or destruction of public or private property. The Court also made clear that the order was based on the peculiar circumstances of the case and would not constitute a precedent.

The Court's intervention also addressed one of the most painful dimensions of the NEET crisis. It recorded the Centre's commitment to formulate a pan-India compensation policy for families of students who died by suicide following the cancellation of NEET-UG 2026. The distinction matters. The Court did not award ₹1 crore to every family; that was a demand raised by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). The government's commitment is to formulate a compensation framework, in consultation with the states and Union Territories, within the stipulated three-month period. The real test will be whether that promise becomes an accessible, transparent and accountable mechanism.

CJP subsequently withdrew its proposed September 5 march from India Gate to New Delhi Police Headquarters. The withdrawal should not be read as the disappearance of the movement. It is better understood as a conditional pause. The protesters have received an institutional response; the state has gained time to demonstrate that its assurances can become policy. Trust will depend not on the announcement but on implementation.

The roots of the agitation lie in the disruption of NEET-UG 2026. More than 22 lakh candidates appeared for the May 3 examination, which the National Testing Agency cancelled on May 12 after concerns raised through law-enforcement inputs. A re-examination was subsequently held on June 21. For students who had spent years preparing through coaching, mock tests and family sacrifice, the cancellation was more than an administrative inconvenience. It disrupted their expectation that a stable process would translate effort into opportunity. The controversy therefore became a question of institutional credibility: if the rules governing merit can collapse, how much trust can students place in the system?

That anxiety found its most visible expression at Jantar Mantar. The July 20 attempt to move towards Parliament escalated the confrontation between protesters and police, with competing claims over the use of force and allegations of violence and property damage. The Supreme Court's later intervention is significant precisely because it separates participation in a protest from individual criminal responsibility. An FIR is not a conviction, but a prolonged criminal case can nevertheless affect a young person's education, employment and future prospects. Protecting peaceful dissent while retaining accountability for genuine violence is therefore not a contradiction; it is the difficult balance democracy requires.

The movement has also spread beyond Delhi. AISA's Gen Z Rising campaign, launched in Ranchi on August 7, has taken the debate across several cities, expanding the agenda from examination irregularities to the abolition of the National Testing Agency, opposition to the National Education Policy, affordable education and employment. This widening is politically significant. A movement that begins with a question paper can quickly become a debate about who gets access to education, who bears the cost of failure and whether degrees still provide a credible route to employment. Political parties may amplify these concerns, but student movements must retain the freedom to disagree with the parties that seek to speak for them.

Jharkhand demonstrates both the power and complexity of student mobilisation. Protests over alleged irregularities in recruitment examinations prompted the state government on August 19 to announce the cancellation of 44 recruitment examinations and processes involving bodies including JPSC, JSSC and TDPL, alongside measures aimed at strengthening recruitment and investigation mechanisms. Yet cancellation is not synonymous with justice. Thousands of legitimate candidates can also suffer when an examination is scrapped. The challenge is to identify wrongdoing without punishing those who played by the rules—a task that ultimately requires evidence, individual accountability and due process.

Bihar offers another version of the same story. Teacher aspirants protesting over the fourth Teacher Recruitment Examination secured the government's decision to conduct TRE-4 as a single-stage examination. The agitation was subsequently withdrawn. But a government promise is only the beginning. The real measure of success will be whether the decision is implemented transparently and whether wider complaints about recruitment examinations are addressed within clear, publicly verifiable timelines.

The appearance of a six-year-old boy at the Bihar protest site added an uncomfortable dimension to the politics of dissent. Children have a right to be heard, but they should never become political shields or be exposed unnecessarily to adult confrontation. Allegations of police excess must be investigated fairly, while parents and organisers also carry a responsibility to safeguard children. A democracy that listens to children must not ask them to carry adult political battles.

The youth movement is now reaching an even more fundamental level—the school gate. CJP's School Thik Karo campaign, launched on August 15 in Maharashtra, seeks to document basic deficiencies in government schools, including drinking water, toilets, electricity, seating and midday meals. This changes the nature of protest. A paper leak can be difficult for an ordinary citizen to verify; a broken toilet, missing teacher or classroom without adequate facilities can be documented. The political value of such a campaign will depend on whether complaints are converted into evidence, responsibility and deadlines for repair.

Across these movements, a new vocabulary is emerging. Young protesters are no longer asking only, "Why has this happened?" They are asking: Who made the decision? Who is responsible? What evidence exists? When will it be corrected? What is the appeal process? What is the deadline? The language of protest is acquiring procedural words—FIR, committee, retest, eligibility, compensation, evidence, appeal and accountability.

This may be the most important transformation of all. Youth dissent is moving from grievance towards agency. A crowd can attract attention, but institutions change only when demands are translated into rules, records and measurable outcomes. Protest can force a government to listen; democratic accountability begins when that listening produces a document, a deadline and a result.

The Constitution protects freedom of speech and peaceful assembly, subject to reasonable restrictions. But the right to protest is not immunity from accountability, just as the state's responsibility to maintain order is not a licence for disproportionate force. Protesters must reject violence and protect vulnerable participants; police must distinguish peaceful assembly from criminal conduct; courts must protect dissent while allowing genuine allegations of violence to be tested through due process.

The Supreme Court's September 1 order embodies that difficult balance. It provides event-specific relief to protesters while preserving a narrow route for investigating serious allegations. It records a compensation commitment without fixing an arbitrary amount. Most importantly, it moves the immediate dispute from confrontation towards implementation.

That is where the next chapter will be written. The Centre's compensation framework, the implementation of the Supreme Court's FIR directions, Jharkhand's recruitment reforms, Bihar's examination commitments and school-level audits will reveal whether this season of protest produces lasting institutional change or merely another cycle of headlines.

The September 5 march may have been withdrawn, but the movement has not disappeared. The street has simply handed the argument to courtrooms, government files, examination calendars and school registers. The strongest youth movements are not those that never shout; they are those that learn to turn a shout into a demand, a demand into evidence, evidence into a hearing and a hearing into a rule that can be checked.

India's young citizens are learning that democracy is not merely the freedom to object. It is the harder task of making institutions answer. The Supreme Court has provided a legal pause. The government has made commitments. The protesters have stepped back.

Now comes the real test: delivery.

Because trust in a republic is not created when an assurance is made. It is created when that assurance survives the file, the deadline, the examination hall and the public record. The republic has begun to listen. Whether it has truly learned to listen will depend on what happens next.

Before power could command the world, knowledge had already begun to shape it; education became the vessel through which that knowledge travelled from one generation to another. Education is often presented as the road to a better career, a higher income and a secure future. Its most remarkable strength, however, lies far beyond employment. Education changes how people understand the world. It gives them the ability to read laws, understand history, question information, recognise manipulation and demand accountability. Hence, the idea of education as power has remained relevant across generations.

A person with knowledge is not necessarily powerful. However, an individual who knows how to think, question and apply knowledge can be much more difficult to control. This is where education goes beyond a degree or certificate. It turns into a way of freedom, and allows people to make choices instead of taking things on faith. This is why unaccountable power fears an educated population because education gives people the tools to question authority.

How can education be a source of power?

Knowledge alters the options that are available to a person. When a child learns to read, he or she can gain access to ideas that are beyond the immediate context. A student with an understanding of technology can find opportunities that other generations may not have found. A citizen who knows his/her rights will know when they are being violated. This is what education does to a society — makes it powerful.

Education also provides people with the capacity to analyze information rather than taking everything they read at face value. A learned individual can ask: What is the evidence? Who is making this argument? What is not stated? What are the advantages of this decision? These questions might seem straightforward, but they are the building blocks of thinking and responsible citizenship.

Why is it that the powerful do not like an educated society?

It would be unkind to claim that all rulers and governments are afraid of educated people. Institutions must be strong and accountable, and they should be open to an informed population, as they can be made more transparent and effective through scrutiny. What is it that the power which is insecure and unaccountable fears? Education itself? No, it is people who know and are confident enough to question it.

An educated population is harder to control with misinformation, fear or empty promises. People who understand history are better equipped to recognise patterns that have appeared before. Those who know the law have the right to challenge decisions that are made without justification. Individuals who are able to assess evidence are less likely to believe a claim just because it is made by an authority figure. Education does not teach people to rebel against authority, it teaches them how to comprehend and assess authority.

The best lesson is to ask why

The best classroom is not the one that teaches students the most. It is the one in which students learn to ask better questions. Why is this true? What is the evidence for it? Is there another reason? What if this decision is incorrect?

These questions lie at the heart of science, journalism, law and democracy. The advancement of science requires challenging accepted theories. Journalism requires tough questions. Examination of evidence is the basis of law. Citizens need to evaluate conflicting claims in order to ensure democracy. A student who learns to question respectfully is not being disobedient, they are learning one of the most important skills that education can give them: critical thinking.

Education is a key component of a healthy democracy

Democracy requires more than just voters. It requires informed citizens who can comprehend information, identify misinformation and make informed decisions. This is especially significant in the context of today's world where information can spread around the globe in seconds.

Fake news can be spread through social media, and AI can create convincing text, images and videos. In this context, it is not enough to have access to information. Students should be taught to check sources, identify bias, to distinguish between fact and opinion, and to assess evidence. Education is thus emerging as one of the best lines of defence against misinformation.

Education does not necessarily equal a degree

In modern society, education is often judged by marks, degrees, rankings and placements. While these accomplishments are important, especially in a competitive job market, they don't necessarily tell the whole story. A student can get very good grades without being confident enough to challenge an idea. A graduate can enter a prestigious profession and still remain vulnerable to misinformation. A person may be technically very knowledgeable but not be aware of the ethical implications.

The success of education should therefore not be judged by what a student remembers. It should also be judged on their ability to comprehend, ask questions, analyse and create. Knowledge is truly empowering when it transforms the way that a person views the world and equips them with the power to make informed decisions.

Can education become a tool of control?

The connection between education and power is complex, as education can free people, but it can also shape their beliefs. What students learn is important, but what they don't learn can be important. A classroom may challenge youth to think differently or may give them one interpretation of an issue.

This is why it is important to foster curiosity and intellectual freedom in education. When students are taught only what to believe, education runs the risk of becoming conditioning. When they learn to evaluate ideas, to compare evidence and to draw their own conclusions, education becomes a liberating force. Education is not about teaching students to think for you, it's about teaching students how to think for themselves.

Why universities must protect the freedom to disagree

A good university is not a place where everyone agrees with each other. It should be a place where ideas are challenged by evidence, reasoning and respectful debate. Students should be able to ask questions of their teachers, researchers should be able to challenge accepted ideas, and alternative perspectives should be explored and not simply rejected.

It is not a failure of education when there is disagreement. At times, it's proof that learning is taking place. The seeds of intellectual development can be sown when a person is confronted with an idea that contradicts his or her own beliefs. The aim of higher education should not be to get all students to the same conclusion, but to enable students to make conclusions based on reasoning and evidence.

Education empowers people to change their future

The most intimate form of educational power is the capacity to envision an alternative future. A child from a disadvantaged background can find opportunities that might not have been apparent to them that he or she could discover through education. It can provide communities with knowledge and skills that generate economic and social opportunities. It can also assist people to realize that their current situation does not have to be their future.

Education doesn't just affect one student. Knowledge is transferred from students to families, from families to communities and from one generation to the next. A teacher can impact hundreds of young minds, and one educated person can impact the decisions and aspirations of a whole family. This is the way education slowly starts to become a tool for social change.

The future is for those who can THINK

The world is changing at a rapid pace thanks to artificial intelligence, automation and digital media. Information is now more easily available, but determining what is true is increasingly difficult. Students therefore need more than the ability to memorise information.They must be curious, analytical, adaptable and capable of evaluating the information they encounter.

Students who know all the answers will not necessarily be the ones best equipped for the future. They will be the ones who can ask the right questions, look at evidence, change when necessary and think for themselves. With technology increasingly able to answer questions, perhaps the most important skill will be knowing which questions to ask.

Education is power that creates independent minds

Education can open a mind, a degree can open a career. Knowledge can enable a person to identify injustice, grasp opportunity and challenge misinformation. A falsehood can be challenged by critical thinking and intellectual freedom can help a society not accept authority without question.

So, education is the power, not because education makes people rebellious or against those who govern, but because it makes them independent thinkers. That's why unaccountable power has always been uneasy with an educated society.

Apparently, the best education system is not one that produces citizens who agree with everything they hear. It is one that produces citizens who can ask difficult questions, demand evidence, tolerate disagreement and imagine something better. 

Thus, a society that teaches its people to think produces citizens capable of shaping their own future, and this is indeed intimidating to those in power who wish to rule and not serve. So, the question is whether we wish to hone education as power or be honed by those in power.

History remembers civilizations not by how rich people were, but by what they thought, learnt, invented, and discovered. 

The Library of Alexandria still feels heavy as one of history’s biggest tragedies, not because the building got burned, but because humanity lost whole bodies of knowledge that we couldn’t just recover later. Wars wrecked manuscripts, dictators put a chokehold on books, and time itself erased countless stories, bit by bit, until they were gone. Each generation looks back at those disappearances with this regret, wondering how history might have moved in a different direction if those volumes had survived.

But here we are, in one of the most technologically advanced eras humans have ever lived through, and it seems we’re making a similar mistake again, not with fire, but with scanners this time. And who is to be blamed? Human greed. 

Videos of rare books being cut are circulating online. Fresh reports say AI companies have been buying massive quantities of physical books, even rare copies and out-of-print editions, then cutting off their spines and scanning every page just to train artificial intelligence models. Afterward, the original books get destroyed, because it’s supposedly cheaper and quicker than preserving them intact. Court papers and legal hearings indicate that this kind of destructive scanning is now baked into the AI industry’s competitive push for high-quality, human-written data.

Legally, a lot of this might be allowed. Morally, though, it leaves behind questions no courtroom can really settle , at least not in any satisfying way. Because a book isn’t only information written on papers. A book is memory , culture, and history you can actually hold in your hands.

Destroying Books Was a Choice, Not a Necessity

The most uncomfortable aspect of this story is that the destruction of books was never an unavoidable consequence of digitisation. And that's where this approach becomes ethically and morally wrong.  Libraries, museums and universities have spent decades preserving fragile manuscripts while simultaneously making them available digitally. Many institutions, including Harvard University, have shown that we can scan and digitalise books without actually destroying the original!

However special equipment, trained archivists, careful handling and much more time is needed for preservation of books, and this is the economical factor that is being avoided. The same operation of cutting the spine off a book and putting it through an industrial scanner is a dramatic improvement in both speed and cost. The financial reward for the industry that's racing to develop the next generation of AI models is clear.

This is where the discussion goes beyond the technical and into the philosophical realm. But whether books can be preserved is no longer the question. They can. The problem is that these big AI Companies who can easily pay for preserving these books are okay with destroying them.

No AI company has publicly claimed that history is expendable, nor is there evidence that they intend to erase literary heritage. But, every industry shows its priorities in the decisions it takes. With the continuing triumph of speed over preservation, when it's done for efficiency and cost-saving, a question arises: Are the commercial considerations starting to undermine cultural responsibility?

Throughout the history of technology, new innovations have always promised to make life simpler. It should never lead to us being lax in what we inherit. 

A Book Is More Than Just The Words Inside It Is

There are people who believe in destructive scanning who say that nothing is being destroyed since everything is kept in a digital format. If the information persists, why should the material object? The answer is no big surprise for those who have a deep passion for books.

A book is not a piece of information. If it were just information, printed books would have been eliminated on the day the Internet came along. After all, almost all classic novels, scientific papers and historical texts are on the internet and available within a few seconds. But bookstores are still thriving, libraries are never empty and millions of readers opt to read books instead of e-books.

This decision does not have much to do with convenience. Books are experiences. They smell of old paper, feel like worn paper and have the feel of a product designed to last generations. The second hand book will most likely be marked in some way with underlined passages, missing bookmarks or handwritten notes that were written by an owner who the reader will never see. Those little flaws become the unspoken dialogue in time.

The words narrate one story while the book tells another. This is something that people who don't read novels very often do know unconsciously. Often students will print out key notes rather than read the notes on screen. Even if you've a laptop and a tablet, writers still carry notebooks around. Individuals write letters rather than scan them into folders. Childhood diaries, family recipe books and old journals are kept as they have emotional value in themselves.

Humans aren't just focused on consuming information, we establish connections with it. What might be preserved here is the text, but all the things that made books part of our common literary culture are lost.

Profit Is Starting To Decide What We Preserve

Books are necessary for AI companies because they require humanity. But guess the irony is greater.  Technology has been offering a vision of a future where machines would produce unlimited knowledge for years. Rather, the AI craze has exposed something new. Human creativity is used in machines. They need authentic writing produced by authors, researchers, journalists and thinkers long before artificial intelligence became part of everyday life. 

That reliance has made books one of the most valuable commodities in the AI economy. The use of AI to learn from human knowledge isn't inherently bad. All generations have brought learning from others. What concerns them now is that centuries of human creativity are becoming seen as just a source for commercial products.

A rare book that used to be cultural heritage gets turned into training data, a cultural heritage book becomes a training data set, a book that was exclusively written, becomes a mere data, and the books that survived invasions, world wars and natural calamities are all now a mere set of data.  The transformation is subtle, but its implications are profound. History stops being something to preserve and gradually becomes something to process.

This may be the natural consequence of a competitive industry. All firms wish for bigger data sets, improved models, and quicker product releases. Growth is expected by investors and timing is all about money and efficiency in the markets. In such an environment, it's logical for a company to select the less expensive choice. However, economically sound is not necessarily ethically sound, isn’t it?

Civilisations have been able to thrive because previous generations saved far more than they immediately needed. . They preserved monuments for their own sake, defended languages known by only a few, and preserved libraries containing books which many never read. They knew that culture does not necessarily have to be quantified monetarily.

Today It Is Rare Books. Where Does the Line Move?

At present, reports largely involve rare and out-of-print books rather than unique historical manuscripts. It would be inaccurate to suggest otherwise. But technological history teaches us that practices rarely remain confined to their original boundaries.

The original social media were never designed to affect elections. Smartphones weren't meant to be a constant presence in every human moment. Streaming services had no idea that they would come along and dramatically change entire film industries. Technology grows where it is encouraged to grow. The same applies with this also.

With the growing diversity and realness of the sources that AI models depend on for human writing, society will have more challenging questions to answer. What happens when there is very little regional literature and it becomes very profitable? Where do endangered-language books go? If there are only a few physical copies remaining, what then?

These are not forecasts or estimates, but questions that deserve to be asked before circumstances force us to answer them. Once destroyed, there is no second chance for reconsidering a rare book. A copy in digital form can retain all words but can it maintain authenticity?

In Trying to Make AI More Human, Are We Making Humans More Like Machines?

It might be the strangest irony of this technological revolution that it has nothing to do with artificial intelligence. It is all about us!

Over the past few decades, researchers have been making efforts to equip machines with human-like thinking capabilities. They have taught them to recognise emotions and communicate naturally, imitate creativity, and understand language. Each advancement has led to machines being closer and closer to human actions. But, as machines grow increasingly human, human beings appear to be going in the other direction.

We are becoming more and more about celebrating speed over patience, summaries over understanding and efficiency over experience. AI composes our messages, condenses our books, creates our reports and spawns our concepts. We skim, rather than read. Rather than reflect, we encourage. Rather than make, we automate.

The threat is not one of total replacement of the human race by AI. The greatest risk is that man slowly starts to imbibe the values of machines.  When every choice is made on the basis of speed, cost and optimisation, we may end up being a civilization of output over understanding. One day we might know that we have the most intelligent machines ever created and forget to remember why books, art and history were important other than for the information they contained.

The Future Should Not Make Us Forget The Past

AI is definitely one of the greatest technological accomplishments of humankind. It could change medicine, education, scientific discovery and many other things. It should keep on going. 

True progress never came when cultural responsibility was given up. It is not a debate on scanning books or training AI Models. It's about the values that will define the future that we are creating. When it comes to preserving our literary heritage, if we're only looking at reducing expenses, we might end up with a world that's been digitised, but with far fewer books remaining.

Inventions are not the only things by which a civilisation is judged in history but also the treasures it chooses to preserve. Maybe someday AI will have the ability to recall all the books people have ever written. But what’s a bigger issue is whether humans will still be able to recall why those books even existed. The problem is trivial right now but in the long run it’ll change the world, and that, perhaps, won’t be for good.