The Council's public argument: why it exists, what it refuses to do, who convenes it, and what it asks of a school leader. It is PrepGraph's commitment to responsible AI in Indian schools, written down so that any school can hold it to its word.
Founding Chair
Ms. Sri Lakshmi
Inaugural term
Inaugural term 2026–27
Convened & funded by
PrepGraph
Standing
Voluntary · Non-statutory
01 · The description
The description the Council will answer to, and the standing it claims.
What the Council is
The PrepGraph Council for Responsible AI & School Innovation – India is a national forum advancing responsible, research-led AI innovation in Indian schools. It exists to bring school leaders, teachers, researchers and specialists to a narrow kind of work: agree language, write practice guidance a school can adopt or amend, ask harder questions of technology, and build an Indian evidence base on what AI actually does to learning. Its mission, stated in full:
To help build an Indian education system strengthened by responsible, research-led AI innovation — preparing students, teachers and institutions for an AI-enabled future by advancing responsible adoption, educator capability, academic innovation, student safety, research evidence and ethical governance.
The mission as adopted. Quoted here rather than paraphrased, because it is the
sentence the Council will be measured against.
Its output is documents and convenings, not services. Membership is honorary, carries no fee, and confers no commercial benefit of any kind. Anyone may nominate anyone, including themselves, and the Founding Chair appoints the founding cohort against published criteria. The founding membership is designed to draw from school leadership, teacher development and pedagogy, responsible AI and technology, child development and age-appropriate use, equity and inclusion, school innovation, and education policy and systems, with an independent at-large seat: a mix chosen so that the Council speaks for schools rather than for any supplier. The inaugural term is 2026-27, from the Founding Chair's acceptance on 29 August 2026. Ms. Sri Lakshmi is Founding Chair, in an honorary and non-executive capacity. PrepGraph convenes the Council as founding organisation, research and knowledge partner, and secretariat; secretariat staff are not members, hold no vote, and cannot approve a Council document.
Membership is not endorsement, and the Charter says so in the article that creates it: "Membership of the Council does not constitute endorsement of PrepGraph or any technology vendor. Members participate in their individual professional capacity to advance responsible, ethical and evidence-informed use of AI and innovation in school education." A person who joins is not being recruited as a reference for a product.
The Council's founding instruments — the Charter, the Responsible AI Principles, the School AI Readiness Framework, the Research Agenda and Ethics, the Independence Policy, the Membership Terms, the Office of the Founding Chair and the programme for the inaugural term — were issued by the Founding Chair on 29 August 2026, and each is open for comment.
The Council's standing should be stated in the same words wherever it is described:
Standing
The Council is a voluntary, non-statutory initiative. It is not a government, regulatory or accrediting body, and it does not certify, rate or approve schools, curricula or products.
It holds no authority over any school and seeks none. Where it refers to public policy instruments that Indian schools already work within, such as NEP 2020 or the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, it does so as context for a school's existing obligations, and not as any claim of endorsement, approval or affiliation.
02 · The argument
Why neither a vendor, a circular nor a training programme can do this particular work.
Why a council, and why now
Three kinds of body already speak to schools about AI, and each is structurally unable to do this particular job. A vendor may publish a standard, but a standard written by a vendor is in the end a description of its own product, and schools discount it correctly. A circular can set a rule, but it arrives after the practice has already formed, applies uniformly to unlike schools, and states what is prohibited rather than what is good; it also cannot be argued with, which is what a school most needs to do while it is still deciding. A training programme can change one teacher, which matters, but it leaves no institutional artefact behind: when the teacher transfers, the capability transfers with her.
A convening body can do four things that none of those can. Hold a room in which principals say to one another what none of them will say from a stage. Settle vocabulary, so that a claim becomes comparable between two schools. Write a floor of practice with no commercial interest in the answer, and place the reasoning in public where it can be attacked. And frame research questions that no single school can afford to answer alone and no vendor can be trusted to mark its own answer to.
The argument for doing this now is not momentum. It is that defaults harden. The AI policies Indian schools write this session will be copied, adapted and inherited for years, and most will be written in a hurry, after an incident or before an inspection. A floor of practice will exist within a few years either way. The open question is whether it is set by people who have run a school, or by procurement pressure and the first serious incident involving a child.
03 · Areas of work
The six pillars
The Council's work is organised under six pillars. They are not themes for a conference programme. Each exists because a school has a decision to make under it, and each is written to end in the question the decision actually turns on.
Pillar01Responsible AI in Schools
The conditions under which a child may encounter AI in the school's name: privacy and what data leaves the campus, bias and whose language and examples a system treats as standard, transparency about when a machine is involved, age-appropriate use, human oversight of anything that touches a mark or a record, academic integrity, child safety, and the discipline of deciding what not to deploy at all. Little of this is technical work. It is the ordinary institutional work of stating in writing what the school permits, what it refuses, and who is answerable when the system is wrong.
The question it answers for a school
What must be in place before a single child uses an AI tool in this school's name?
Pillar02Teacher AI Enablement
Teachers are being asked to supervise a technology nobody has explained to them. This pillar concerns what a teacher should understand about how these systems work, where they fail, and why a confident answer is not a correct one; and what productive use looks like in preparation, differentiation, feedback and assessment design. The position is augmentation, not replacement: return time to the part of teaching only a teacher can do, and make that gain measurable rather than asserted.
The question it answers for a school
What should a teacher here be able to do with AI by the end of this year, and how would we know that she can?
Pillar03Student AI Readiness
Readiness is not the ability to prompt a chatbot, which most students already have and none were taught. It is the ability to judge: to notice when an answer is fluent and wrong, to check a source, to cite honestly, to declare what was machine-assisted, and to understand what a student gives up when she outsources the part of the work where the learning happens. This is closer to critical reading and academic honesty than to computing, and it belongs in ordinary subject teaching rather than in a separate period.
The question it answers for a school
What must a student be able to judge about a machine's answer, and at which stage do we teach it?
Pillar04Academic Innovation
The academic uses that might actually be worth the disruption: identifying learning gaps early, formative assessment that informs teaching rather than only recording it, differentiated work for a class of mixed attainment, personalised practice, and new models of instruction where they are genuinely better rather than merely newer. The honest version of this work is narrow. Choose one teaching problem, define in advance what improvement would look like in this school's own marks and its own teachers' time, and be willing to conclude that it did not appear.
The question it answers for a school
Which teaching problem here is worth pointing this technology at first, and what result would count as a real improvement?
Pillar05School Leadership & Governance
Adoption is a governance decision before it is an academic one. What a school should adopt and what it should decline, which policies it needs and who owns them, what belongs in a contract about data, exit and accountability, how parents are informed, how staff are trained, and how a tool is reviewed after a year and discontinued if it has not earned its place. Most of governance is the capacity to say no with reasons, in a season when saying yes is easier.
The question it answers for a school
What should this school adopt, what should it refuse, and what must be answered before anything is signed?
Pillar06Research & Evidence
This pillar exists because the evidence a school is shown was mostly gathered elsewhere, by parties with an interest in the finding. It covers building an Indian evidence base under Indian conditions, research ethics where children are involved, open publication with method attached, and measurement designed to survive scrutiny from someone who would prefer the result to be false. Negative and null results are part of the record, not an embarrassment to be withheld.
The question it answers for a school
Is there Indian classroom evidence for the claim in front of me, and if not, what would it take to produce it?
Six limits, each of which can be checked against published work rather than taken on
trust.
What the Council is not
Each of the following is a limit the Council accepts on itself, and each can be checked by reading its published work rather than by trusting its intentions.
The neutrality position is a standing rule and appears in the same words on every Council document:
Neutrality
The Council does not endorse individual procurement decisions or technology vendors. Its role is to advance responsible AI readiness, educator capability and evidence-based innovation in schools.
Not a regulator
It issues no rules and imposes no obligations. Its guidance carries the authority of its reasoning and nothing else. A school is free to read it and do otherwise, and owes the Council no account of that.
Not an accreditor
There is no certification, no rating, no seal, no register of approved schools and no register of approved products. No school may describe itself as Council approved, and no vendor may describe a product that way. The Council will ask, in writing, for any such use to be withdrawn.
Not a buyers' club
The Council runs no group purchase, negotiates no discount, brokers no introduction to a seller and shortlists nothing. It will not circulate a list of recommended tools, publicly or privately.
Not a sponsorship platform
The Council accepts no sponsorship, exhibition fee, advertising, stall or speaking payment from any technology company, PrepGraph's competitors included. PrepGraph is its funder.
Not a vendor's marketing arm
No Council instrument or guidance names a commercial product, PrepGraph included. The only exception is a research publication in which a named product is the object of study, and there the funding and participation are disclosed at the head of the document.
Not a voice for its members
Participation is not agreement with any Council document. A member may require that a dissenting note of up to three hundred words be printed alongside the output, under their name if they wish, unedited except for length and law.
The funder named on the page rather than in a footnote, and the rules that hold the
boundary.
Who convenes it, and what contains it
PrepGraph is an AI learning company, working in India and the United States, from school to first job. It sells learning software to students, families and schools, and runs a research programme on how learners remember and build skills. It founded the Council, funds it and provides its secretariat, and the Council carries PrepGraph's name because the connection should be stated plainly.
The secretariat's offices are held by named people: Umesh Sharma, Founder & Executive Convener, who is Founder & CEO of PrepGraph; Rekha Sharma, Executive Director & Secretary-General, who is PrepGraph's Chief Operating Officer; and Anisha Sarkar, Director, Education Partnerships & National Outreach, who works on education partnerships at PrepGraph. The line between the Council and the secretariat is stated in one sentence, quoted wherever the two are described together: "The Council determines the recommendations and principles. The PrepGraph-supported Secretariat enables research, coordination, publication and implementation. The Secretariat holds no vote."
The funder's other activities are described here only so far as they bear on that boundary, and without naming a product or linking to one: "PrepGraph's activity has three parts: learning software sold to students, families and schools, from school to first job; an internal research and development function; and this Council. The first two are commercial. This one is not, and the rules in the Charter and the independence policy are what hold the boundary."
What follows are the rules that hold it. Each is a rule with a mechanism, not an assurance.
1
Approval sits with the Chair, not the funder
The secretariat drafts. Nothing is published under the Council's name without the Founding Chair's written approval, and PrepGraph cannot publish, amend or withdraw a Council document on its own.
2
The secretariat holds no vote
None of the three officers holds a vote on publication, on standards, on membership, on a vendor question or on anything else; none counts towards quorum; and none sits on the ethics review panel. The Executive Convener withdraws when the Council decides any matter in which PrepGraph has an interest.
3
No editorial control for the funder
PrepGraph has no editorial review. It may correct factual statements about its own systems, and it cannot delay, amend or withhold anything the Council publishes.
4
No product is named
No Council instrument or guidance names a commercial product, PrepGraph included, outside a research study of which that product is the object.
5
No vendor money
The Council takes no sponsorship, advertising, exhibition, stall or speaking payment from any technology company, including firms competing with PrepGraph.
6
An independent Chair
The office is held on the condition that its holder has no shareholding, employment, commission, consultancy or procurement relationship with PrepGraph and takes no fee for the role. If the condition ceases to be met, the Chair stands down and the reason is published.
7
Dissent is printed, not managed
Any member may require that a dissenting note of up to three hundred words appear in the published document, under their name if they wish, unedited except for length and law.
8
A stated failure condition
If the Council is used to recommend a purchase, it has failed at the thing it was made for. Members are asked to say so publicly, and the Council carries any such statement on its own page, unedited.
Copy a member may take and edit freely, and the two cautions that hold in every case.
Words you can reuse
When members and schools are asked, in corridors and on messaging groups, what this Council is, short answers travel and long ones do not. The following are offered for reuse and may be edited freely.
Two cautions
Two cautions hold in every case. Describe the Council as voluntary and non-statutory, never as an authority. And no school, member or vendor should use a phrase such as Council approved, Council certified or Council recommended, because no such status exists and none is planned.
The one-sentence description
The PrepGraph Council for Responsible AI & School Innovation is a voluntary, non-statutory national forum, convened and funded by PrepGraph, that develops open guidance and Indian research on responsible AI use in schools; it does not certify schools, rate products or endorse vendors.
For reuse verbatim in a bio line, an introduction or a reply to a parent.
If you are asked whether it is government or board recognised
It is not. It is voluntary and non-statutory, it has no official standing with any government body or examination board, and it approves nothing and nobody.
Correct the framing rather than let it pass. Silence here is how a false claim becomes an assumption.
If you are asked what a member gets
No published document, no rating and no commercial advantage a non-member cannot have. The guidance is public and free. What a member gets is an early draft to argue with, and what a member gives is time and disagreement when the draft deserves it.
Useful when the question behind the question is whether membership is a commercial arrangement.
Short form: on evidence
Evidence before adoption.
The shortest form. Set under the Council name.
Short form: on the floor of practice
A floor of practice for AI in Indian schools, argued in public.
Best where the audience is principals, correspondents and trustees.
Where this becomes binding
This page argues the case. The charter is where it binds.
The Founding Charter sets the same commitments out article by article, including the ones that constrain PrepGraph, and the independence policy sets out how the boundary with the funder is held. Both are published in full.
The Council is a voluntary, non-statutory initiative. It is not a government, regulatory or accrediting body, and it does not certify, rate or approve schools, curricula or products.
Neutrality
The Council does not endorse individual procurement decisions or technology vendors. Its role is to advance responsible AI readiness, educator capability and evidence-based innovation in schools.
