Where Kashmir stands in AI — and what we need to do

This school year, a ten-year-old in Beijing will spend at least eight class hours learning about artificial intelligence. In the United Arab Emirates, AI is now part of every public school from kindergarten to Grade 12. In Estonia, upper-secondary students are being given AI learning tools — after their teachers have been trained first.

And in Jammu & Kashmir, in the latest state-wise figures (UDISE+ 2023–24), fewer than half of all schools reported having a computer at all.

That gap is real, and it is worth looking at honestly — because the answer to it is not what most people assume.

What the rest of the world is doing

In the last two years, AI stopped being an optional club in the computer lab and became something countries teach to every child.

• China. Beijing's primary and middle schools began general AI education in September 2025, with a minimum of eight class hours a year, covering three things: understanding AI, using it, and its ethics and social responsibility. Schools can teach it as its own course or inside existing subjects. (China Daily)
• The UAE. From the 2025–26 school year, every public school teaches AI from kindergarten to Grade 12, folded into an existing computing course and taught by the same teachers. Ethics is one of its seven areas, alongside data and algorithms. (Gulf News)
• Estonia. The country that put the internet into every school in the 1990s launched AI Leap in September 2025: 20,000 students in Grades 10 and 11 and 3,000 teachers in the first year, with teacher training in the autumn first, and AI learning tools for students after. (Estonian Ministry of Education and Research; Eurydice)
• The United States. An executive order in April 2025 set up a national task force on AI education, teacher training, and a Presidential AI Challenge for students. (Executive Order 14277)
• UNESCO published the first global framework of AI competencies for students in 2024: twelve competencies across four dimensions — a human-centred mindset, the ethics of AI, AI techniques and applications, and AI system design. (UNESCO)

Notice what these have in common. None of them is mainly about apps. Every one puts ethics and judgement next to the technology, and the strongest ones put teachers first.

What India is doing

India has had AI on the CBSE syllabus for older students for some years, through the Skill subjects 417 (Classes 9–10) and 843 (Classes 11–12). From the 2026–27 session, it goes much younger: CBSE's curriculum on Computational Thinking and AI for Classes 3 to 8 builds computational thinking into maths, languages and EVS in Classes 3–5 through puzzles, games and stories, and introduces foundational AI in Classes 6–8. Teacher training runs through NISHTHA. (Morung Express)

So the national direction is clear. The question for us is whether Kashmir's schools can walk in that direction at the same pace.

Where Kashmir stands

Three facts matter most.

1. The machines are not yet in most schools. In UDISE+ 2023–24, 41.4% of schools in Jammu & Kashmir reported a computer facility and 45.3% reported internet — against national figures of 57.2% and 53.9% that year. (UDISE+ 2023–24, state-wise) The national figures rose to 64.7% and 63.5% in 2024–25 (UDISE+ 2024–25 analysis); the gap between government and private schools inside J&K has been even wider — in 2021–22, government schools trailed private ones by 55.5 percentage points on computers. (JKPI)

2. A whole cohort lost time online. High-speed mobile internet was suspended across J&K from August 2019 and restored in February 2021 — eighteen months. (Deccan Herald) A child who was in Class 5 then is in Class 11 or 12 now. Whatever we think of the reasons, the effect on learning anything that lives on a screen was real.

3. AI barely speaks our language. Kashmiri had 6.8 million speakers in the 2011 Census (Census of India 2011). Open research models such as AI4Bharat's IndicTrans2 now cover Kashmiri in both Perso-Arabic and Devanagari scripts (IndicTrans2), but a model is only as good as the text it learns from, and very little Kashmiri text exists in a form a machine can learn from. Ask a chatbot about a shrine in Baramulla or the history of a Sopore orchard and you will see it: fluent, confident and often wrong.

What this does not mean

It does not mean Kashmir's children must wait until every school has a lab before they learn AI.

The most important things a child needs to learn about AI do not need a computer. What is a pattern? What is a prediction? Who collected this data, and who was left out? Why does a confident answer sometimes turn out to be false? These are ideas, and ideas can be taught with a blackboard, twelve apples and a good question. Computer scientists have known this for decades; the CS Unplugged activities from the University of Canterbury teach algorithms, data and even AI without a single computer. (CS Unplugged)

The countries above did not start with hardware either. Estonia started with teachers. The UAE started with an existing course and existing teachers. Beijing let schools teach AI inside the subjects they already have.

What we need to do

1. Teach understanding, not apps. Apps change every year. What a model is, why it gets things wrong and when not to trust it do not. CBSE's new framework and UNESCO's competencies both point this way.

2. Start with what schools already have. Paper, a blackboard, a phone in the teacher's hand. Every AmanahVale mission has a No laptop today? version for exactly this reason — in the lesson where a machine learns to grade apples, the teacher writes twelve apples on the board, eight already graded, and pairs work out the rule. (See how a lesson works.)

3. Train teachers first. A teacher who has used AI tools for their own work teaches AI better than any video can. That is why the platform gives teachers their own course before their class.

4. Teach judgement as hard as skill. A Class 8 lesson on hallucination ends with one line: "Fluent is not the same as true. No source, no sentence." In a place where AI knows little about us, that habit matters more here than almost anywhere.

5. Put Kashmir into the examples. Children learn what AI is from problems they recognise: grading apples at the mandi in Sopore, Srinagar's weather, a weaver's pattern as code, AI in our orchards and saffron fields. Every book in the library is written that way.

6. Build Kashmiri into AI ourselves. Nobody else will collect our sentences for us. Kashmir AI Research is building an open Kashmiri–English corpus, a benchmark and evaluation by native speakers — and classes can take part, with a parent's agreement and without any child being named.

7. Protect children while we do it. India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 requires verifiable parental consent before a child's data is processed and prohibits tracking, behavioural monitoring and targeted advertising directed at children. (DPDP Act, 2023, section 9; CyberPeace) Any AI tool or platform used in our schools should be held to that — no leaderboards, no profiles of children, no data a child cannot take back.

The trust we were given

The word amanah means a trust — something given to us to take care of. AI is arriving in Kashmir whether our schools are ready or not: on every phone, in every job, in what our children read and believe. We cannot control that. What we can control is whether our children meet it understanding what it is, how it works and when not to trust it.

That does not need a lab in every school first. It needs a good lesson, a trained teacher, and the decision to start.