2022 State of the Education Report for India: UNESCO

In News

• UNESCO has released the State of education report for India 2022: Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education.
  • It is the 4th edition of the annual report of UNESCO with the aim of increasing the application of AI in education in India.

Key Points

• Scope of AI Market:
  • AI Market in India is likely to reach US Dollar 7.8 billion by 2025 at the rate of 20.2 percent compound annual growth.
  • AI-driven technology is going to help India’s GDP growth.
• Emphasis on AI in NEP 2020:
  • To match India’s curriculum to make the students ready for the AI economy, India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 lays a big emphasis on:
    • The need to impart the necessary technical knowledge and 
    • The integration of AI in Education to also promote quality and skill-based education to meet the demands of Industry 4.0. 
• National Strategy on Artificial Intelligence:
  • Released by NITI Aayog in 2018 
  • India has made great strides in the development of responsible and ethical AI governance, starting with NITI Aayog’s #AIForAll campaign to the many corporate strategies that have been adopted to ensure that AI is developed with common, humanistic values at its core.
• US India Artificial Intelligence (USIAI) initiative:
  • It has been launched to scale up the science and technology relationship between India and the United States.
• Indigenous Solutions:
  • AI can provide possible solutions for various challenges using AI techniques like ML, NLP, learning analytics, computer vision, etc.
  • Indigenous AI-based solutions are being developed in India for different sectors like healthcare, agriculture, smart mobility and government initiatives to accelerate efficiency and efficacy.

Challenges  in the education sector in India

• Gender dimension: The literacy rate in India is 74.04 percent, 82.14 percent for males and 65.46 percent for females. 
• Teaching issues: According to UNESCO (2021), high pupil-teacher ratios and lack of professionally qualified teachers are the biggest challenges in India’s education system, and need a lot of attention.
• Linguistic barrier: India is a country of linguistic diversity, with over 19,500 languages and dialects currently used and spoken in India. As such, the medium of instruction in schools is sometimes not the mother tongue, which results in students having difficulty comprehending concepts. It is also a huge challenge to provide digital learning content to cater to students with different linguistic backgrounds. 
• Massive Data Centres Needed: AI requires massive computational capacity, which means more power-hungry data centres and a big carbon footprint.
• More Energy Consumption: According to studies, around 40 % of the total energy that data centres consume goes to cooling IT equipment. Now, to reduce energy consumption, companies are moving their data centres into cooler climates such as Siberia.
• Environmental Impact of Coolants used in Data Centres: The environmental impact caused by data centres doesn’t stop at electrical consumption. Coolants are often made of hazardous chemicals, and battery backups at data centres – needed for when there are power shortages – cause an environmental impact both due to mining for battery components and the disposal of the toxic batteries afterward.
• Jurisdictional Issues of Data Pooling: Countries are passing stricter legislations on data security that require citizen data to be stored on servers located domestically, picking colder climates beyond their borders is becoming a difficult option.
• Privacy Issues: AI uses digital footprints and feeds them in their algorithm to exploit commercially without our consent.
• Displacement and loss of jobs of lower strata: Robotics and AI companies are building intelligent machines that perform tasks typically carried out by low-income workers: self-service kiosks to replace cashiers, fruit-picking robots to replace field workers, etc.
• Creating New Inequalities: Without clear policies on reskilling workers, the promise of new opportunities will in fact create serious new inequalities.
• Widening gap: Widens Gap between the developing and the developed countries.

Government’s Efforts 

Image Courtesy: Report 

Way Ahead to Improve Scope of AI in India

• The government should consider the ethics of artificial intelligence in education as an utmost priority.
• Rapidly provide an overall regulatory framework for Artificial Intelligence in Education.
• Creating effective public-private partnerships to ensure that all students and teachers have access to the latest technology.
• Expanding AI literacy efforts.
• Making attempts to correct algorithmic biases and the resulting discrimination.
• Improving public trust in Artificial Intelligence.
• Request the private sector to better involve students and educationists in developing AI products.
• Place ownership of data with the students.
• Embrace the versatility of Artificial Intelligence in Education systems.

Source: timesnow