What the post-BYJU's Indian K-12 AI landscape actually looks like from inside it. What schools should ask vendors. What DPDP changed. What the regulators didn't say out loud. Written by Bishwarup, edited by no-one.
The DPDP Act came into force on 13 May 2025. The Children's Data rules sit dormant until 13 May 2027. In that two-year window, every school in India has the chance to do something they've never had: tell a vendor "no" with a law behind them. Here's what changes, what doesn't, and the three questions to ask every AI vendor on the next sales call.
Read the essayEach month, one long-form essay. Topics drawn from what we're actually seeing in partner schools, what regulators are publishing, and what founders are asking on calls. The titles below are committed; drafts are in progress.
A line-by-line walkthrough of the 30-October-2025 notification + the April 2026 rollout, separating what's compulsory from what's interpretation.
Read →The three-tier escalation protocol, the counsellor-notification cadence, and why the school never sees the actual words.
Read →Hosting, data residency, DPA terms, training-on-student-data clauses, content-filter pass-rates, escalation SLAs, the works. With model answers.
Read →Trustees love long policies. Teachers ignore them. Parents don't read them. Here's the three-page version we ship — and why it works.
Read →The literacy gap is real. The mother is the gatekeeper. The principal listens to the trustee. Three things I got wrong in the first month.
Read →The economics of free-tier AI for schools, who pays (your child's data), and why the school's "we're saving money" calculation is wrong.
Read →A timeline: what happened, what stuck, what was theatre, and what changes in 2027 when the Children's Data rules go live.
Read →The state-board landscape is no longer "wait for CBSE." Four state-board mandates already exist. Here's the deep map.
Coming →Fear Of Getting Scammed replaced Fear Of Missing Out. Here's what that means for any B2B-school AI vendor.
Coming →Appendix 6 wasn't a mandate, the Mumbai principles weren't either, but together they're the closest thing the IB has to an AI standard.
Coming →National Education Policy, National Curriculum Framework, MoE 30-Oct-2025. The funding doesn't follow the framework. Why.
Coming →Verifiable Parental Consent flow, the Schedule IV exemption, the Significant Data Fiduciary threshold. A school-by-school countdown.
Coming →The "AI for personalised learning" pitch is a teacher-replacement pitch in disguise. Here's the pitch that lands.
Coming →The pre-25 conservatism, the post-25 commitment, the safety-classifier follow-on in 2027. A long answer to "but won't competitors copy?"
Coming →What the current models miss, what we're building, why this is the moat.
Coming →The Freshworks / Zoho / WebEngage / Postman pattern, applied to schools. Long, cheap, B2B, and won by founders who stay.
Coming →An honest retrospective. Numbers, decisions, regrets, lessons.
Coming →The 1,200+ Indian-curriculum schools abroad. What's different about selling there. What's the same.
Coming →A year-end retrospective. What stuck. What broke. What we're betting on next.
Coming →The "TAM is huge, ARPU is tiny" trap. The B2B-only thesis. The DPDP moat. A long letter to anyone who's pitched on us.
Coming →Five paragraphs you can forward to your trustee. Plain English. No buzzwords. No "transformation."
Coming →The principles we wrote on day one. The ones we still hold. The ones we revised.
Coming →Published the first Tuesday of every month. No marketing. Unsubscribe in one click. Topics: post-BYJU's Indian ed-tech, DPDP enforcement, child-safe AI, the Indic safety gap, what the brain is teaching us.
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