– Ashique Ali, Senior Specialist – Education, ChildFund India

Walk into almost any government school that has recently received a computer lab or a set of coding kits, and you will see the same hopeful scene: rows of new machines, laminated posters about Scratch and robotics, a beaming principal, and a group of children who have never touched a keyboard before suddenly being told that this is the future.

Six months later, in far too many of these schools, the picture looks different. The machines are still there. The posters have faded a little. But the energy is gone. The lab has become a room that is unlocked for the annual inspection and remains shut for the rest of the year.

This is not a story about broken equipment or wasted budgets. It is a story about what was missing from the beginning: a person in the room who knew what to do with the equipment, could translate a syllabus into something a ten-year-old in a village school could understand, and stayed long enough for that understanding to grow into confidence.

For years, India’s conversation about closing the digital and skills divide between its cities and villages has been dominated by hardware: how many computers each school has, how much bandwidth is available in every classroom and how many devices are provided per child. These numbers matter, and no one should pretend otherwise. But anyone who has spent time inside government schools in smaller towns and rural districts will recognise a harder truth: a device without a guide is just furniture.

What determines whether a coding programme takes root or quietly dies after the pilot ends is the presence of a trained, motivated and locally rooted mentor who can accompany children on their learning journey.

Think about what learning to code demands of a child. It is not a subject that can be memorised from a textbook the night before an examination. It rewards experimentation, tolerates failure and depends on someone being present to say, “Try this differently,” or to explain why coding is unlike a conventional school lesson with one correct answer at the back of the book.

In an urban private school, that person is often a specialist teacher, sometimes supported by an after-school coding academy for which the family pays separately. In a rural government school, the responsibility usually falls to an already overstretched teacher handling four other subjects—or, worse, to nobody at all. The lab sits idle not because children lack curiosity, but because the ecosystem around them lacks a mentor.

This is where mentor-led models offer something genuinely different from the device-first approach that has dominated policy thinking. A strong mentor-led coding programme does three things that a laboratory alone cannot.

First, it builds capacity within the system rather than around it. It trains teachers and identifies promising young people from the same community who can become near-peer mentors, ensuring that knowledge does not disappear when a project cycle ends.

Second, it treats coding as a way of thinking rather than merely as a piece of software. Many rural children begin with unplugged, offline activities that develop logic and sequencing before a single device is switched on. This approach is especially important in schools where electricity and internet connectivity remain unreliable.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, it remains present long enough to build trust. Children who have seen visiting programmes come and go learn to be sceptical of anything new. It takes a familiar and consistent face to convince them that this programme is worth their effort.

What makes these models effective on the ground is not glamorous. It involves weekly follow-up visits rather than one-off training workshops. It requires mentors who speak the local dialect and understand the pressures faced by children from farming or daily-wage households. It also means linking coding activities to problems children already recognise—such as a water shortage in their village or an inefficiency in the local market—rather than importing case studies designed for an entirely different context.

None of this appears neatly in a photograph of a shiny new laboratory, which may be why mentorship receives less funding than hardware. Yet it is precisely this layer that determines whether learning takes root.

There is also more at stake than school performance metrics. India’s next generation of engineers, designers and entrepreneurs will not come only from cities. If rural children are given a genuine and sustained pathway into computational thinking, supported by mentors who believe in them and remain by their side, there is no reason they cannot become creators of technology rather than merely its users.

The urban-rural skills gap is often described as an infrastructure problem because infrastructure can be counted and photographed. Mentorship is harder to capture on a dashboard, but it is the engine that determines whether any of that infrastructure is used effectively.

If Indian education wants coding to become a genuine equaliser rather than another privilege determined by geography, the policy conversation must widen. Fund the laboratories, certainly. But fund the mentors just as seriously. Train them, retain them and measure their impact with the same rigour applied to device counts.

Children in these schools are not short of curiosity or ability. What too many of them lack is a person who shows up week after week and says, “Let us figure this out together.” Far more than any single device, that is what will determine whether India’s coding revolution reaches every classroom or only those that were already ahead.

Also Read: Beyond IBCs: Why Transnational Education Is the Next Big Shift in Overseas Education