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I spent last weekend in Pune at the India Science Festival and left with real confidence in the country’s future. The event brought together students, scientists, teachers, policymakers, and families in a buzzing atmosphere of ideas and discovery. Young people from across the country, including children from the poorest villages, were talking about AI, sensors, and quantum computing, and proudly demonstrating their projects. They spoke openly about failed experiments, what they had learned, and what they would try next. This was learning by doing, not memorising; they were collaborating, tinkering, and thinking like builders.
This is exactly what India needs more of to inspire the next generation. For the first time in history, children in remote villages have access to the same knowledge and technologies as students in the West.
Their schools may lack resources and their teachers may not always show up, but that hasn’t stopped them from learning or building. They may be poor, but they are digitally fluent. They use smartphones to watch tutorials, search for answers, join online communities, and increasingly explore with AI. They don’t wait to be taught, they teach themselves — and in today’s world, that may be the most important skill of all.
Meanwhile, as happens too often in education and policy circles, I found myself in rooms with well-meaning academics from India, the US, and Canada reminiscing about Jawaharlal Nehru and calling for more government control and more government funding. Some even argued that Indian children can’t innovate without top-down reform. It was clear they hadn’t stepped outside. They were out of touch with the quiet revolution already underway, led not by institutions, but by young people who are learning, building, and solving problems on their own.
This shift is easy to miss if you are looking through outdated foreign lenses. But it is happening all over India, and it is moving faster than most people realise.
That became painfully clear in one of the more heated moments of the weekend, during a closed-door session with a professor from the University of Toronto. He insisted that by every global benchmark, India could not possibly be considered innovative — too few patents, too few academic publications, and too many applications to his university from India (as if the next generation was trying to escape the country).
The subtext — and superiority complex — was unmistakable.
We argued, because what he, and so many others, fail to understand is that these benchmarks were built around Western institutions, publishing systems, and funding models. They measure academic output, not actual learning. They capture invention in formal labs, not grassroots problem solving. They completely miss the raw, distributed innovation I saw at the festival — and the Indian way of jugaad.
If the benchmark were digital fluency, India ranks #1 in the world. Nearly everyone has a smartphone; UPI is the default for daily transactions; people troubleshoot on WhatsApp, learn on YouTube, and increasingly ask AI — often in their own languages.
One of my taxi drivers in Delhi casually pulled out ChatGPT, in Hindi, to answer a question I’d asked. That’s what innovation looks like in the real world.
India doesn’t need to wait for institutions to catch up or take cues from western gatekeepers. The next generation is already innovating — and is not asking for permission. They’re learning, building, and solving with what they have, where they are.
The festival reflected the depth and range of India’s scientific ecosystem. Children and first-time builders shared space with senior scientists and leaders like Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan, astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla, AI pioneer Ashish Vaswani, astrophysicist Nikku Madhusudhan, and former principal scientific adviser to the government of India, K VijayRaghavan. They weren’t behind velvet ropes, they walked the grounds, spoke with students, and answered questions. That proximity matters. For many young attendees, it was the first time they saw science practised by people who looked like them, spoke like them, and took their ideas seriously.
That openness is central to the festival’s DNA. Its founder, Varun Aggarwal, saw the need for a space where science could come alive for everyone, not just researchers or elites. A tech entrepreneur himself, he wanted to bridge the gap between science and society. When he launched the festival in 2020, he called Indian science a sleeping giant and set out to wake it up. That vision has taken hold. The 2024 edition drew more than 36,000 attendees, and it’s only growing.
Yes, India has a lot of work to do. Its schools need fixing and it needs to support its innovators. The education system that the British imposed on India still trains for obedience more than creativity. Quality varies wildly and inequality is real. But the most hopeful sign is that learning is no longer waiting for all of that to be solved. It’s already happening, driven by curiosity, and enabled by access. The hunger is there, the tools are there, and the spark is already lit.
The India Science Festival is exactly the kind of platform India needs to unleash the potential of its young population and leap into the future. It underscored what is possible when children are trusted to explore, when science is made accessible, and when knowledge is treated not as a privilege, but as a shared resource.
Vivek Wadhwa is CEO, Vionix Biosciences. The views expressed are personal
