AMIT KUMAR SHARMA

There isn’t a talent gap. Indian students win international Olympiads and fill engineering colleges by the million. What breaks down earlier is basic: a child is told what a circuit does without being handed a wire and battery. Description is standing in for experience

The scale of India’s schooling system is impressive. The Economic Survey 2025-26, tabled in Parliament on January 29, estimated the number of school-going children at 246 million, arguably the largest worldwide. What that scale hides is how much of it is memorisation dressed up as learning. The number receiving comprehension tells a different story than the enrolment figures.

ASER 2024, Pratham’s annual survey of rural children countrywide, puts a number on the damage. Only 33.7 percent of class III children can solve a basic subtraction problem, an improvement over 25.9 percent in 2022 but still nowhere close to the ideal. Subtraction is not an advanced STEM skill, it’s the floor. When two-thirds of eight-year-olds can’t clear it, algebra, physics and coding stacked on top later can’t be of much use to children who never got poured proper foundation.

There isn’t a talent gap. Indian students win international Olympiads and fill engineering colleges by the million. What breaks down earlier is far more basic: a child is told what a circuit does without ever being handed a wire and battery. Description is standing in for experience. But description alone has never taught anyone to think like a scientist.

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 calls for experiential learning from the foundational years, and the government’s Atal Innovation Mission (2016) has since set up over 10,000 Atal Tinkering Labs spread across 35 states and Union territories, reaching more than 11 million children with the help of 6,200 mentors. Children in these labs get their hands on basic robotics kits and prototyping tools rather than diagrams — a model the government has rolled out school-by-school, from Bengaluru’s municipal schools to girls’ government schools in Amritsar.

Ten thousand labs across a country with 1.46 million schools is still a small fraction. Most children will finish school without ever walking into one. Why this excellent, common-sense initiative hasn’t spread like wildfire within the school system is an enduring mystery.

Long before any of this policy machinery kicks in, most children would have already experienced science without calling it that. Dropping an antacid tablet into water and watching it fizz. Holding a magnet near a pile of pins. That instinct to poke something and see what happens is where scientific thinking actually starts, and it usually starts at home, not in class VI.

What kills curiosity is years of being provided answers to copy rather than problems to solve. Fixing this doesn’t require every school to have a fully equipped lab. It requires encouraging children to build a bridge out of ice-cream sticks and watch it collapse, because that failure teaches more about load and structure than a formula ever will. It requires puzzles that make a child reason through processes without labelling it ‘homework’.

Trained teachers and a structured curriculum still do the heavy lifting, and NCERT’s framework isn’t sufficient. But there’s a lot of room on either side of the school day, weekends, evenings, the gap between tuition and dinner, where a child’s curiosity either gets fed or is allowed to go stale.

Early signs are encouraging. Preschool enrolment is climbing and foundational reading scores are recovering, as confirmed by ASER. STEM doesn’t have to wait for class VI to catch that momentum. It needs children building and breaking things a lot earlier than the syllabus currently allows.

A simple example. Instead of asking children to memorise Ohm’s Law or learn textbook definitions of electrical conductivity, give them a battery, a small bulb, and a few everyday objects. Let them build a simple circuit and test materials such as coins, plastic pens, or a piece of foil to discover which ones permit electricity to flow and which don’t. The moment the bulb lights up or fails to, children begin to understand the difference between conductors and insulators through direct experience, without relying on memorisation.

This is the philosophy at the heart of Crazinos. Through hands-on, practical learning kits, children work with real circuits and DIY components to build, experiment, test, and even make mistakes in safe environments in school or at home. The objective is not merely to help children remember textbook concepts for examinations, but to encourage hands-on experimentation, ask questions, explore possibilities, and understand how things work through direct action.

When a child asks, “What if I try this?” and discovers the answer through his own experiment, learning comes alive and becomes more meaningful. Natural curiosity combined with freedom to explore and learn through trial and error builds a strong foundation for scientific temper and development of durable problem-solving skills.