Dr. Biswajit Saha

Dr. Biswajit Saha, Director of Training & Skill Education at CBSE, joined as Chief Guest and opened with his own unlikely path into school education — from the National Informatics Centre and Tripura Central University, through a decade as an engineering college faculty member, before a slow, accidental turn toward schooling. He confessed he arrived with limited knowledge of the system; what changed his thinking at CBSE was the shift from "how to improve teaching" to the bigger question of how to prepare a child for the world in a fast-changing one.

That shift produced his core conviction: policy alone cannot transform education. Policy reaches a child only when it travels through a capable teacher, a thoughtful principal and an enlightened school leadership — all three of which, he noted, were in the room. The ability that matters now is to learn, unlearn and re-learn.

On the tier-2 and tier-3 challenge — teacher quality, the marks mindset, access to high-quality learning — he argued against waiting for a few heroic individuals. Transformation comes from the system: academic alignment and leadership together create a common benchmark of quality that survives year-to-year variation in teachers. He asked each school to self-assess its curricular journey, pedagogy and transaction, and to set personal two-year objectives that resonate between teachers and management.

He was blunt about the fear that training teachers only to lose them is a waste. The leakage is small — and even if a network runs 18% attrition, the answer is not to stall the growth of the 91% for the 9% who leave. Treat upskilling as a philanthropic investment in the community, and remember that talent also flows in: people join your system from outside at mid and senior levels, bringing balance.

Asked what an ideal school looks like for a child entering in 2027 and graduating toward 2040–47, he framed it around Vikashit Bharat: technology infused into both systems and curriculum; competency-based education (what a child can do with knowledge, not what is memorised); and, for senior classes, project-based learning on real problems of community, nation and industry. Indian and foreign languages both matter for the 2040 economy. On skill education he warned against reducing it to a period, a teacher and an exam — skilling must make the child capable, and that fights the timetable, teacher-readiness and parent mindset that treat only "academic" subjects as serious.

On devices he was measured — a minimum tab-based digital journey is an essential 21st-century skill, with a few current-generation PCs to seed innovation, but 100% tab culture should be checked against real use cases given the screen-time-versus-attention debate. He closed on AI: every teacher, leader and owner needs basic AI literacy; technology can generate competency-based questions and map each child's learning pattern, and ultimately the schooling structure itself — its timetable, grouping and assessment — should bend to the individual child rather than fitting forty children to one question.