Questions, answered plainly

The Council is a national forum advancing responsible, research-led AI innovation in Indian schools. PrepGraph convenes and funds it, and the name sits on the front because a declared connection can be checked, where a neutral-sounding one cannot.

Three tests show what the Council is, and anyone can apply them. No Council document names a recommended, preferred or approved product, PrepGraph's included. Everything published is free at council.prepgraph.com, without registration, e-mail address or form of any kind, and will also be sent on request; there is no members-only tier. And every document approved for publication is given a number in one unbroken sequence at the moment of approval, so a document approved and then withheld would leave a visible gap in the register.

PrepGraph pays for all of it: the secretariat, the convening and the cost of publication. There are no membership fees, no sponsorships and no other funding. Any future funding source is disclosed before it is accepted, not after. The amount PrepGraph spends on the Council in the inaugural term is stated in the annual public record, which the Charter requires to be published within ninety days of the end of the term.

What the money buys is administration, carried out by three named officers of the Secretariat, none of whom holds a vote or counts towards quorum. The controls below are obligations of process, not assurances about anyone's character, and each one is visible when it is kept.

Nothing that the Council decides, because the offices they hold carry no vote, and every decision that matters here is a vote. Umesh Sharma, Founder and CEO of PrepGraph, is the Council's Founder & Executive Convener. Rekha Sharma, Chief Operating Officer of PrepGraph, is its Executive Director & Secretary-General. Both are officers of the Secretariat. Neither is a member of the Council, and the Secretariat is not the Council.

Four facts answer the question, and each can be checked against the Charter rather than taken on trust. Neither holds a vote — not on publication, not on standards, not on membership, not on a vendor question, not on anything else. Neither counts towards quorum, so the Council is never quorate on the strength of its Secretariat. Publication in the Council's name requires the Founding Chair and a majority of the voting members. And every voting seat is an independent seat that no officer of the Secretariat may hold, because Charter Article 6 bars any person who is an employee, director, shareholder or paid adviser of a supplier of AI products to schools, or who otherwise derives material income from one, from holding office and from voting. PrepGraph is such a supplier, so its own officers are barred first.

The line is stated in one sentence and in the same words wherever the two bodies appear together: "The Council determines the recommendations and principles. The PrepGraph-supported Secretariat enables research, coordination, publication and implementation. The Secretariat holds no vote."

The officers are named, with their PrepGraph roles stated beside their Council offices, so that each can be held to the limits of the office by name. 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.

Three named offices, all of them provided and paid for by PrepGraph, and none of them holding a vote.

Umesh Sharma, Founder & Executive Convener, who is Founder and CEO of PrepGraph, holds the founding intent and the research direction. He brings emerging research and technology questions to the Council, including the ones that are inconvenient for a company selling AI to schools; identifies where Indian schools are working without guidance; presents implementation evidence with its provenance and its limitations stated, for the Council to accept, discount or reject; funds and organises studies on the terms the Research Agenda sets and no others; and convenes working groups.

Rekha Sharma, Executive Director & Secretary-General, who is Chief Operating Officer of PrepGraph, runs the Council's business. Meetings, papers circulated in advance, minutes that record disagreement as well as agreement, the register of members, the record of the Council's business, the work programme between meetings, the convenings and educator programmes, and the passage of a draft through member comment, dissent, approval and publication.

Anisha Sarkar, Director, Education Partnerships & National Outreach, builds the Council's external network: school leaders, school groups and associations, regional roundtables, and outreach for founding membership and Expert Fellowships on the Chair's invitation and over the Chair's signature.

What none of the three does is decide. "The Council determines the recommendations and principles. The PrepGraph-supported Secretariat enables research, coordination, publication and implementation. The Secretariat holds no vote." Each office's limits are published beside its mandate, at the same length as the mandate, because an office described only by what it may do has not been described.

No. There is no office in the Charter from which he could. The Executive Convener proposes; the Founding Chair and the voting members decide.

Stated as the things he specifically cannot do: he cannot vote on any question; he does not count towards quorum; he cannot approve, amend, delay or withhold a Council publication, which requires the Chair and a majority of the voting members; he cannot sit on the ethics review panel or take any part in its decisions; he cannot be present when the Council decides a matter in which PrepGraph has an interest; he cannot compel an agenda item, because the Chair may decline one without giving a reason; and he cannot remove the Founding Chair, shorten her term or appoint her successor. Removal of the Chair is by two thirds of the voting members other than the Chair, on stated grounds.

What he does get is a hearing and a record of it. Every proposal he makes is minuted with its source named, so a reader of the minutes can see which items came from the funder and what happened to each of them. PrepGraph's separate factual-accuracy pass is the narrow one described elsewhere in this document: ten working days, limited to statements about its own systems, silence publishes, every comment logged and published with the output.

"The Executive Convener may contribute research, evidence and proposals. Council recommendations are determined collectively and are not subject to commercial approval by PrepGraph."

No. The position is fixed: "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." It binds PrepGraph most tightly, because PrepGraph is the convener.

No Council publication will name PrepGraph as recommended, preferred or approved, and none will present PrepGraph's own product evidence as an independent Council finding. If a Council document appears to do either, write to council@prepgraph.com. The number of such reports and how each was resolved is stated in the annual public record.

Not through the Council. Member and participant contact details are held on a list separate from PrepGraph's commercial systems and are not loaded into them. They are not used for sales outreach, campaigns or lead scoring, and they are not sold, rented or shared.

The same bar covers what PrepGraph might learn rather than what it might take. Nothing said, seen, collected or observed in Council work may be used for PrepGraph's product development, roadmap, pricing or competitive analysis. The annual public record answers that as a yes or no question rather than by restating the policy.

If your school is approached commercially because it took part in Council work, that breaks the Council's own rule. Report it to the Founding Chair at council@prepgraph.com. The count of such reports appears in the annual public record. If your school wants a commercial conversation with PrepGraph, it happens through PrepGraph's ordinary channels and stays outside the Council entirely.

By written rules that bind her Council office more strictly than any other in the Secretariat. Anisha Sarkar, Director, Education Partnerships & National Outreach, also works on education partnerships at PrepGraph, and the rules that separate the two roles are written to leave a trace rather than to be believed.

Inside a Council activity she may build participation: invite school leaders, work with school groups and associations, convene regional roundtables, organise the logistics and see that a published note follows each one, and represent the Secretariat at school-network and association meetings. She may not raise, invite, accept or continue a commercial conversation about a PrepGraph product, price, pilot or contract. She may not present, demonstrate or describe a PrepGraph product at a Council convening, in any format, including in answer to a direct question.

When a school raises commercial interest during a Council activity, she says at that moment that the conversation moves to PrepGraph's ordinary business channel. Participation in a Council activity never becomes a prospect record, and a Council invitation list, attendee list or contact detail may not be used as a prospect list or passed to anyone who would use it as one.

A Council roundtable that becomes a product demonstration is a breach of the independence policy, and anyone who sees it may report it to council@prepgraph.com, from where matters of substance are put to the Founding Chair. The count of such reports and how each was resolved appears in the annual public record.

No. Research questions, methods and the analysis plan are registered and dated before results are known, and the registration entry goes to every member at the time it is made. Findings are published whether or not they favour AI in schools, including negative and null results.

What PrepGraph does get is narrow, and it is stated in the same words in every instrument that mentions it. PrepGraph has no editorial review. It receives one written factual-accuracy pass, limited to statements about its own systems, of ten working days. Silence publishes. Every comment it makes and every change that follows is logged and published with the output. It cannot delay, amend or withhold anything. It may append a signed response, published alongside the finding rather than in place of it.

Because the protocol is in members' hands, a study that is registered and then never reported is answerable to people outside PrepGraph's employment. Any member may say so publicly, and no term of membership prevents it.

The Charter. Every other instrument, this FAQ included, is subordinate to it and void to the extent of any inconsistency. The Charter may be amended only on the majorities it states, up to three quarters of the voting members for the entrenched Articles, and the Founding Chair cannot amend it alone.

Where this FAQ paraphrases the Charter, the Charter's words are the ones that bind. If you find a place where a Council document reads more favourably to PrepGraph than the Charter does, the Charter governs; report it to council@prepgraph.com so that the document can be corrected.

Publication in the Council's name requires the approval of the Founding Chair and a majority of the voting members. That is Charter Article 12 and it is the only rule; where any other document reads as though the Chair approves alone, the Charter governs. Working groups draft. The secretariat, which PrepGraph staffs, edits for style, circulates for comment and handles production, and has no authority over substance. Every publication carries the names of those responsible and their declared interests. For a study involving children, the ethics review panel additionally holds a veto over publication; it does not share in the approval.

If the Council approves a document that PrepGraph will not produce or host, the Chair may issue it under her own name and circulate it directly to members, and this FAQ is her standing authority to do so. If the Chair resigns, her stated reason is published unedited, or she may publish it herself to the member list. PrepGraph has no means of preventing either, which is the point of stating it here.

Yes, and it cannot cost them their standing. There is no confidentiality clause and no non-disparagement condition attached to membership, and none will be introduced.

Removal is governed by Charter Article 7, which states the grounds and the procedure and is not summarised more narrowly here: removal requires cause, notice and a hearing, and a decision by two thirds of the voting members in office. It is never in the gift of the Chair alone and never in the gift of the funder. Criticism of PrepGraph, of the Chair or of the Council's own work is not among the grounds and will not be made one. Any removal is notified in writing with the ground stated, and both the fact and the ground are entered in the public register and reported in the annual public record.

Write to council@prepgraph.com setting out what is wrong and why. Correspondence is acknowledged within five working days and answered within thirty days, which is the service standard for everything sent to that address.

A factual error is corrected within thirty days with a dated note that stays attached to the document and says what changed. Published work is never amended silently. A substantive methodological objection receives either a published response or a published statement that the Council does not intend to respond and why. A member who disagrees with a document they contributed to may have a dissenting note of up to three hundred words published alongside it, in their own words, unedited except for length and law.

No. "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."

The Council claims no approval from any ministry, board, examination authority or international organisation. Council documents may refer to public instruments a school already works within, such as NEP 2020 or the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023. Reference is context, not approval. Nothing the Council publishes carries weight in an inspection, an affiliation process or a tender, and it should not be cited as though it does.

No, and it will not. There is no seal, no accreditation, no rating and no approved-school list, because a Council funded by a company that sells to schools should not confer status on schools.

What exists instead is self-assessment: frameworks a school applies to itself, keeps to itself and uses to decide what to change. No school may describe itself as Council-certified, Council-approved or Council-recognised, because no such status exists. If a school or a vendor makes such a claim, the Council will state publicly that the claim is false.

The first task under the research pillar is an agenda, and it is published on this site. The Research Agenda and Ethics Framework sets out which questions about AI and learning in Indian schools are worth answering, which can be answered honestly at Indian school scale, and the ethical conditions under which the Council would attempt any of them.

Any study that follows is voluntary, consented and specific. A participating school's data belongs to that school. The Council receives only what the registered protocol lists, uses it for that study alone, and returns or deletes it when the study concludes. A completed readiness self-assessment sheet is never collected, in any study, by any route.

No. Membership consents to nothing. Taking part in a study is a separate written decision by the school, made after the purpose, the exact data items, the retention period and the publication plan are set out in advance.

Where children's data is involved, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023 is treated as a floor rather than a ceiling. Each study names its Data Fiduciary, which is the school or PrepGraph and never the Council, states the method of verifiable parental consent and who verifies it, and names a grievance officer who answers within thirty days. The Council's protocol binds as processing instructions. Individual records are not used where an aggregate or de-identified dataset can answer the question, and a protocol that asks for individual records must state in its registration entry why the question cannot be answered without them. A school may withdraw at any time and require the return or deletion of its data.

Two further things are fixed. A completed self-assessment sheet is never collected, requested or accepted, so what a school writes about its own gaps cannot reach the Council or PrepGraph by any route. And the duty under section 19 of the POCSO Act 2012 is a personal legal duty on every Council researcher and office-holder to report to the Special Juvenile Police Unit or the local police, which no consent form, confidentiality undertaking or agreement with the Council may qualify or route through a school instead.

They are used for Council business only: meeting notices, drafts circulated for comment, approved documents and the register.

The register of members and the contact list are kept by the Executive Director & Secretary-General, Rekha Sharma, who is also PrepGraph's Chief Operating Officer, and the secretariat is otherwise staffed by PrepGraph employees, so PrepGraph personnel do see member contact details. The controls are that the list is held separately from PrepGraph's commercial systems, that it is not transferred into them or used for commercial outreach, and that you may have your details removed by writing to council@prepgraph.com. Removal is completed within fourteen days and confirmed to you in writing.

One category is kept away from the secretariat altogether. Declarations of interest, including anything about a member's school's commercial relationship with PrepGraph or with another supplier, are received, held and published by the Reviewer of Concerns, not by the secretariat. A register of who is licensing, piloting or negotiating with whom, maintained by the funder's own employees, would be a market map, so the secretariat is barred from holding it.

Nothing. There is no membership fee, joining fee, paid tier or paid sponsorship of Council publications. Members are not asked to buy anything, at any stage, as a condition of participation.

If this changes, the change is published before it takes effect and no one is charged retrospectively. A member who does not accept a change may leave without any obligation.

There is no fee. Founding membership means that a person joined during the inaugural 2026-27 term and agreed to do the work of that term. Founding Members are the Council's voting members alongside the Chair, and the vote is the substance of the office: publication requires the Chair and a majority of them, the Chair can be removed by two thirds of them, and the entrenched Articles cannot be amended without three quarters of them. Expert Fellows, Observers and the secretariat do not vote. It confers no ownership, no equity, no permanent seat, no entitlement to a seat in any later term and no priority in anything PrepGraph sells.

The Charter says what it is not, in terms: "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."

The seats are allocated by constituency rather than filled first-come, and a member is named publicly only once they have accepted in writing.

No. Ms. Sri Lakshmi holds the chair as an honorary appointment for the inaugural term of twelve months, without salary, honorarium, fee, commission or equity from the Council or from PrepGraph for the role.

Reasonable travel and accommodation costs on Council business may be reimbursed by the secretariat. The total reimbursed over the term, and the number of persons reimbursed, is stated as a figure in the annual public record. Any change to this arrangement is stated publicly before it takes effect.

Each Founding Member seat belongs to a constituency, so the answer depends on which seat is in question: school leadership; teacher development and pedagogy; responsible AI and technology; child development and age-appropriate use; equity and inclusion; school innovation; education policy and systems; and an independent seat at large. The school leadership seats require a current role in a school or school trust, across CBSE, state board and ICSE schools: principals, correspondents, trustees, managers and heads of department. The other seats are for the constituency named, and a person who does not work in a school may hold one. The mix is deliberate: it puts people in the room who can test a claim, not only people who run schools.

Everyone else who wants to contribute is considered as an Expert Fellow or as an Observer. Fellows are appointed for expertise and do not vote; Observers attend, are minuted by name and do not vote. Membership is individual and held in a personal capacity, so joining does not commit, badge or represent your school. More than one person from the same school may join.

Anyone may nominate anyone, including themselves, by writing to council@prepgraph.com. There is no closed circle, no referral requirement and no advantage in knowing someone already involved. The nomination and invitation list may not be derived from PrepGraph's commercial records. The Founding Chair appoints the first cohort against published criteria; every appointment after that requires the assent of the Founding Members. An application may be refused, and a refusal is given in writing with the reason stated, so that it can be disputed.

One bar applies to both classes. A person who is an employee, director, shareholder or paid adviser of PrepGraph or of any other supplier of AI products to schools, or who otherwise derives material income from one, may not hold office as a Founding Member or Expert Fellow and may not vote.

Honest participation and a declaration of relevant interests, including any commercial relationship with a supplier of AI products to schools.

The commitment is fixed in the Membership Terms rather than left to an average: four convenings in the term of one hundred and twenty minutes each, attendance at at least two of the four, about thirty minutes of reading before each, and one piece of work of four to six hours delivered before the fourth convening. That is fourteen to sixteen hours across twelve months, and what members were asked to do is reported against it in the annual public record. Members are not asked to fundraise, to recruit schools, to promote any product, or to lend a name to a document they have not read.

Yes. Everything the Council publishes is free at council.prepgraph.com to read, use, adapt and circulate within your school without joining, registering, giving an e-mail address or asking permission, and it may be reproduced with attribution. Nothing is withheld from non-members and there is no members-only tier.

Members do get one thing a non-member does not, and it is a responsibility rather than a privilege: they see drafts before publication and are expected to read them and either put their names to them or dissent on the record. No member receives a published output, a rating, a certificate or a commercial advantage that any other reader cannot have.

The single limit on use is that using a framework does not entitle a school to claim Council endorsement, membership, recognition or approval.

Yes, and for most schools that is the stated default rather than a concession. There is no registration, no declaration form, no logo and no obligation to inform the Council that you have adopted anything. The Principles say the same thing in the same words: resolve internally, put the principles where staff can see them, and publish to parents when the exceptions are closed. A school in an admissions market has no obligation to hand its competitors a list of the gaps it has just written down. A self-assessment is most useful when a school runs it privately and finds something uncomfortable, which is unlikely if the result is visible to a vendor.

The corollary is that the Council verifies nothing and knows nothing about your school's practice, so no public claim of Council recognition can rest on having adopted a document.

Not in any office, and not in any working group. A person who is an employee, director, shareholder or paid adviser of any supplier of AI products to schools, or who otherwise derives material income from one, may not hold office as a Founding Member or Expert Fellow, may not vote, and may not sit on a group that drafts or reviews a Council output. That is the Charter's bar and it applies to every supplier, not to PrepGraph alone. There is no quota or ratio permitting a proportion of vendor staff, because a quota would imply an eligibility the Charter denies.

Vendor staff may be heard as invited Observers. They may be asked to explain how a system works, and the fact of their attendance and their declared interest are minuted and published. They hold no office, take no decision, draft nothing, and may not describe attendance as endorsement or as participation of any other kind. The composition of every working group is published beside the output it produced, so the bar can be checked rather than trusted.

PrepGraph's position is not equivalent to that of any other vendor, because it founded, funds and staffs the Council. That asymmetry is disclosed rather than flattened, and it is why the bar is written to cover the convener first.

It changes nothing. Council frameworks name no product, so they are as usable by a school running another vendor's system, or none at all, as by any other school. A Council document that names a product as recommended or preferred is a defect, and reporting it to council@prepgraph.com should produce a dated correction.

The Council does not ask which platform a school uses and has no need to know. A school uneasy about telling a PrepGraph-convened body what it has bought should simply not say.

By binding each working group to a dated deliverable and publishing the record either way. A group that produces nothing within twelve months is closed, and the closure is named in the annual public record alongside the work that was completed.

The eight founding instruments are published on this site. The readiness framework, in particular, is eight domains of school practice, each mapped to one of the six pillars, and a sitting of about ninety minutes for a school's own leadership team. The open resources the programme produces next are listed below, and each is reported against in the annual public record.

The inaugural term runs for twelve months from 29 August 2026 and ends on 29 August 2027. Continuation is decided by the voting members.

Before any second term the Council publishes the annual public record, within ninety days of the end of the term, setting out what the Council set out to do, what it delivered, and what PrepGraph spent. The chair for any second term is elected by the voting members who served the inaugural term, from nominations; PrepGraph takes no part in that election, proposes no candidate and holds no veto. PrepGraph cannot remove the Chair. Removal is by two thirds of the voting members other than the Chair, on stated grounds, and the office is otherwise vacated only on death, on written medical incapacity, or on a failure to act for a stated period.

It stays available. The Council would close by name and in writing, with a closing note recording what it published. Everything already published stays free to reproduce with attribution, so its usefulness does not depend on PrepGraph continuing to host it or on the Council continuing to exist. Member data is deleted or returned on request, and no list is left in anyone's hands.

The Council is unincorporated and signs nothing itself, so PrepGraph contracts, holds copyright and acts as data fiduciary as bare trustee for the Council on the terms of the Charter, under a signed deed between PrepGraph and the Chair. On a change of control, an insolvency or a sale of the assets, that deed requires the successor to reaffirm the Charter in writing, and research data is deleted or returned without any further decision by anyone being required.

Write to council@prepgraph.com. For a nomination, give the person's name, school or institution, role, and a few lines on which constituency and which pillar their experience would strengthen. Self-nomination is welcome and treated no differently.

The same address takes applications, corrections, objections, breach reports, research enquiries and requests for removal from the list. Correspondence is acknowledged within five working days and answered within thirty days, and matters of substance, including anything alleging a breach of the rules in this document, are put to the Founding Chair. The address is administered by the Secretariat, which PrepGraph staffs.

The Council gives no advice it does not publish, so it will not tell a school privately whether a product is safe, a policy adequate or a deployment wise. What a question gets is an acknowledgement, a correction where something is wrong, or an answer by a published output available to every reader at the same time. A question many schools share is more likely to become one.