Seventeen-year-old Anshveer Bindra’s laptop crashed. Then it crashed again. He remembers it as one of the more grueling stretches of the five-day sprint during the International Mathematical Modelling Challenge (IM²C) held this year. (Sign up for THEdge, The Hindu’s weekly education newsletter.) Bindra was running the optimisation code his team had built to figure out how to protect a wildlife park in Namibia they had never visited, using data on poaching, wildfires, and tourist traffic that four Indian teenagers had spent days scraping together from open maps and government records. The model was too heavy for his machine to handle. When it finally ran clean, he remembers it as a kind of relief that bordered on disbelief. “It was wonderful how beautifully the entire thing fit together and how it all worked,” Bindra said. “That was a surreal experience.” Join THEdge LinkedIn group That five-day sprint, done almost entirely over Zoom calls in March, has now earned Bindra and three teammates, Tanish Kulkarni, Vedansh Saha and Nipun Saha, a Meritorious Award at the International Mathematical Modelling Challenge, placing Team India among the top 11 teams out of 68 from 37 countries. It is one of the strongest results an Indian...

Artificial intelligence has moved from buzzword to daily reality in higher education faster than most of us expected. Walk into almost any university campus today and you’ll see experiments popping up - generative AI tools helping students draft assignments, chatbots answering queries, and faculty experimenting with AI for research data analysis. The tools feel powerful. The possibilities seem endless. (Sign up for THEdge, The Hindu’s weekly education newsletter.) But dig a little deeper, especially across emerging markets like India, and a different picture emerges. Most institutions are still firmly stuck in pilot mode. A few AI courses here, an isolated research lab there, some administrative automation in one department. Very few have built anything resembling a coordinated, institutionwide strategy. This gap matters. Universities that figure out how to move beyond scattered experiments will shape the next decade of higher education. Those that don’t risk being left behind. The numbers highlight both the progress and the problem. According to the EYParthenon and FICCI report from 2025, 60% of Indian higher education institutions now allow or encourage student use of AI, 53% are using generative AI for learning materials, and 40% have introduced AI-powered tutoring or chatbots. Around 57% have some form...

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