Every year, TechSparks, YourStory’s flagship startup-tech summit, brings together entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, and aspiring founders under one roof to exchange ideas and spark the next wave of innovation. The 17th edition carried that spirit forward, but with a sharper question at its core: how can India stop being a consumer of technology and products, and start building them for itself and the world?

The final day of the summit made one thing clear. Building for India starts with its classrooms, its engineering colleges, and even the labels on its food.

Educating 247 million primary and secondary students is a monumental task. But according to Sushma Boppana, CEO of Sri Chaitanya Group of Institutions, and Santhosh Viswanathan, Vice President and Managing Director for APJ at Intel, India’s biggest hurdle is structural, not numerical. In a fireside chat with Shradha Sharma, Founder and CEO of YourStory and The Bharat Project, the two leaders discussed what student success now looks like when schooling remains rooted in nineteenth-century methods while society has leapt into the intelligence era.

“When you come into the real world... you don’t have... work time and... tech time. Tech and work are merged together,” Viswanathan said, calling for technology to be embedded natively into everyday learning. He pointed to AI’s ability to personalise instruction, so a child who loves cricket could learn quantum mechanics through the sport.

Boppana, drawing on Sri Chaitanya’s reach of two million learners, said character now outweighs test scores. “In this generation if we are able to build up resilience, engagement, accountability these are the three aspects which are more important than academic education,” she said.

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