Education in North-Eastern India faces deep structural inequities. The region’s difficult terrain, remoteness, and years of insurgency have slowed social development and limited access to quality education. Many schools lack basic infrastructure such as adequate classrooms, furniture, and toilets. The shortage of trained teachers is another major challenge. In several rural schools, one teacher is responsible for teaching multiple subjects or grades, making it extremely difficult to deliver quality learning. Dropout rates remain significantly higher than the national average, with many students leaving school early to support their families through farming or household responsibilities. While India’s national secondary school dropout rate ranges from roughly 8–13%, several northeastern states report rates closer to 15–20%. Data from the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) also shows that a larger proportion of 15–16-year-olds remain out of school in states such as Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh compared to the national average.
Bridging this inequity requires a breakthrough, and technology has the potential to play that role. Technology can expand access, reduce isolation, bring exposure to new ideas, and improve the overall quality of teaching and learning if used effectively. In regions where educational resources and trained teachers are limited, technology can act as a force multiplier, helping systems move faster toward closing long-standing gaps.
Across India, however, conversations about the latest technology, artificial intelligence in education, often focus on elite schools, coding labs, and advanced digital classrooms. But the real transformative potential of AI may lie elsewhere, in last-mile communities where teachers work with limited resources, limited training, and limited time. If used thoughtfully and responsibly, AI could become one of the most powerful equalisers for teachers and students in remote regions.
Sunbird Trust works in the conflict-affected and remote areas of North-Eastern India. The intervention is primarily in the Education field. I started living and working in Mualdam village in Dima Hasao district, Assam. When I first came here in 2021, we didn’t have a network/internet connection. When the internet finally arrived in May 2023, the transformation was immediate. What happened in December 2016 across the country, it happened in May 2023 in Mualdam. An internet crazy society was instantly formed. Within 2–3 years, nearly 80% of households had at least one smartphone. People quickly learned how to navigate the digital world, streaming videos, downloading apps, and consuming large amounts of data daily. In many ways, the digital revolution that India experienced years earlier arrived suddenly in Mualdam.
My role was to set up the school and work closely with the teachers and the school leader to develop Haite Memorial Friendship School. At the organisational level, I also look into recruitment, social media, and some projects.
During a recent recruitment process for school leadership roles, I posed a scenario to candidates: a group of motivated teachers wants to deliver better lessons but struggles to find time for lesson planning because of household responsibilities such as farming, cooking, collecting firewood, and caring for family members. Despite their passion and motivation, they still do not come to school planned and prepared. A good lesson plan takes anywhere between 25 and 30 minutes for an experienced teacher. If a teacher teaches four classes in a day, that would require around 2–2.5 hours of planning time.
I asked candidates how they would support these teachers in planning better lessons. Most responses focused on motivation, supervision, or training. But none mentioned using technology or AI to simplify lesson planning.
It tells us how far behind we still are in acclimatising ourselves to technology and AI. There are multiple schools of thought about the use of AI in education. One believes that AI is killing critical thinking and slowly numbing our ability to think deeply. On the other hand, there are those who believe that AI is the only way to bridge existing gaps and move towards building a more just society. AI in education can be a game changer for educators. Many elite schools have already adapted to it and are using it extensively. I do agree with the first school of thought to some extent. At the same time, I also believe that AI is here to stay, and eventually, all of us will have to learn how to use it. If I have to evaluate the situation, I see far more benefits in using this technology responsibly.
Back at our school in Dima Hasao, in the year 2024, we had a volunteer from Lucknow named Rumaan. He came here to teach Math to our kids. In a short span of time, he became very close to our teachers and students. He taught math to our kids, played the guitar, taught the school principal how to take attendance on Google Sheets every day, and also taught the teachers how to use ChatGPT.
Our teachers got a taste of what it can do and the wonders it can create, and they slowly started using it. They began using it to do research, ask questions for which they did not have answers, prepare assignments, build notes, shorten long answers into brief summaries, compress lessons, ask how to teach a lesson, generate lesson plans, create posters, plan events, and much more. The efficiency has increased almost tenfold. Tasks they were earlier hesitant to take up, they are now able to do confidently because they know ChatGPT is there to support them and help them get things done easily and efficiently. They have been using ChatGPT, Meta AI, Gemini, and Perplexity, and so far, they have found ChatGPT the most useful and handy.
“I have been using ChatGPT to prepare my lessons. Recently, I took a picture of a lesson and attached it to ChatGPT and asked it to generate fill-in-the-blanks and MCQs for that lesson, as the chapter did not have any at the end.”
— Rinkimi Ngamlai
“I have been using it to make worksheets, search for ideas, and make plans.”
— Zaiona Pame
In the same year, a Teach For India fellow launched an AI tool called FalconAI for teachers. It generates lesson plans, scaffolded assignments based on Bloom’s taxonomy, and lesson summaries. We demoed it and really liked the product for our use. However, before we could get our hands on it, they changed their subscription model, which was not viable for us.
But what FalconAI showed us was what was possible. For decades, teacher training organisations have been training teachers to bring planning into their classroom practice, but because it is time-consuming, many teachers never take it seriously. With tools like this, teachers can sit and make a plan for four classes in less than 30 minutes and spend another 30–40 minutes understanding and preparing it. Just an hour a day can improve their classroom delivery exponentially. Teachers appreciate this because, at the end of the day, they also want better results and growth in their classrooms.
“I have used ChatGPT to generate music. Whenever we have guests coming to our school, we sing songs for them. What I do is write a prompt and ask it to generate lyrics. I then use those lyrics in an AI-enabled app, Suno AI, to generate music based on the lyrics. We give the lyrics to the students and play the music for them to practise and sing on the day of the guest’s visit.
I also make posters for school functions, admissions, and other events, and I have been using AI apps to make them. It takes only a few minutes to generate what I need, and I am able to make them much faster. I also use it to find the easiest way to explain concepts. I teach Social Studies, and the topics are vast, so I use Gemini or ChatGPT to write key points, shorten them, and create MCQs.”
— Hudson Ngamlai
Artificial intelligence will not replace teachers, nor should it. But it can become an extraordinary support system for teachers working in the most difficult contexts. For decades, education reform has focused on training, monitoring, and accountability. While these are important, AI now offers something different: the ability to dramatically increase a teacher’s capacity within minutes.
If used thoughtfully, AI could become one of the most powerful equalisers in education, not for the elite schools that already have resources, but for teachers in remote villages who have always had to do more with less.
