India, Nasscom to Revamp Undergraduate Courses With AI Curriculum

India's government and Nasscom are developing an AI-focused curriculum for undergraduate programs, the industry body said. The goal is to update what students learn as the technology reshapes hiring across sectors.

The curriculum review and changes are expected to take about six months to finalise. That timeline points to a rollout in the 2025-2026 academic year, assuming approvals hold.

The effort targets a gap that has been widening. Companies across IT, banking, and manufacturing have been asking for graduates who can work with AI tools, not just understand the theory. A curriculum rewrite of this scope hasn't happened since computer science became a core engineering subject two decades ago.

Nasscom, which represents India's $250 billion tech services industry, has been pushing for faster syllabus updates. The group previously flagged that 40% of the country's engineering graduates lack the skills needed for tech jobs. An AI-specific curriculum is a direct attempt to close that gap at the entry level.

For India's roughly 40 million undergraduate students, the change would mean exposure to machine learning, natural language processing, and data ethics in their first two years rather than elective specialisation in the final year. That shift matters because most hiring for entry-level tech roles happens from general undergraduate programs, not AI postgraduate degrees.

The government and Nasscom did not specify which universities would pilot the curriculum or how faculty retraining would be handled. Those are the two bottlenecks that have slowed past curriculum reforms. A previous attempt to introduce data science in undergraduate programs in 2020 struggled because most colleges lacked instructors qualified to teach it.

The six-month timeline is ambitious by Indian academic standards, where syllabus changes at public universities typically take 18-24 months. Sources close to Nasscom said the compressed timeline is possible because the curriculum is being designed as a flexible framework that individual universities can adapt, not a single standardised syllabus that requires approval from multiple regulators.