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WHITE PAPER
From Rote to Reason:
Reimagining Indian Education
with AI-Powered Critical Thinking
The Case for www.My-Teacher.in as
India's National Thinking Platform
Hemen Parekh
www.HemenParekh.ai
| www.IndiaAGI.ai
June 2026
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Context
This white paper
synthesises over 70 blog posts written by Hemen Parekh between July 2024 and
February 2025, together with his decade-long thought leadership on Indian
education reform. It is published in response to a Times of India report (May
2026) asking whether critical-thinking competitions can change how Indian
classrooms function — and argues that competitions, while welcome, are
insufficient without an always-on, AI-powered infrastructure for cultivating
the habit of asking WHY.
The platform described here —
www.My-Teacher.in — is already live, fully free, and requires no
registration. It is India's most-ignored education breakthrough waiting for a
policy champion.
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1. Executive Summary
India produces
the world's largest cohort of examination-trained graduates — and some of its
least critically-equipped young professionals. The National Education Policy
2020 correctly identifies critical thinking as a pillar of 21st-century
learning, yet classroom practice remains overwhelmingly driven by rote recall,
past-year question papers, and rank-anxiety. The Times Critical Thinking
Championship (2025) and similar competitions have demonstrated that young
Indians can think creatively when given permission. But competitions touch a
few thousand students; India has 250 million school-going children.
This white paper
makes three arguments:
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The crisis is structural,
not motivational — teachers teach to the test because the system rewards
nothing else.
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Competitions are a spark, not
a fire. The fire requires an always-on, zero-cost, AI-powered platform that any
student can access from any smartphone, at any hour, in any language.
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That platform already
exists. www.My-Teacher.in, conceived and built by Hemen Parekh, operationalises
Edward de Bono's CoRT Thinking Programme on a mobile interface, generates over
294 quintillion unique test papers, and serves as a 24x7 personal tutor — at
zero cost, with zero registration.
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"In
my experience, most schools do not teach thinking at all. Some schools teach
the limited thinking skills involved in information sorting and
analysis." — Edward de Bono, Teach Your Child to Think
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This paper calls
on the Ministry of Education, NITI Aayog, and corporate India to recognise
My-Teacher.in as national infrastructure for cognitive development — and to
pilot it formally across 1,000 schools in the next academic year.
2. The Diagnosis: A Broken System in Plain Sight
2.1 The Rote-Recall Trap
India's education
system has a single dominant success metric: examination scores. From Class 1
through NEET/JEE, the message to students is unambiguous — memorise answers,
not questions. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) has found year
after year that nearly half of Indian Class 5 students cannot read a Class 2
text. The dysfunction runs deeper than literacy: students who can decode text
have rarely been taught to interrogate it.
The consequence
is visible at the workforce end. Employers across IT, manufacturing,
healthcare, and banking consistently report that fresh graduates lack the
ability to frame a problem, disagree constructively, or generate a novel
approach. India is producing information-retrievers in an era that demands
insight-generators.
2.2 Coaching Culture and the Kota
Syndrome
The coaching
industry — estimated at over ₹58,000 crore annually — has industrialised rote
preparation. Kota, the coaching capital, processes hundreds of thousands of
aspirants annually, with documented student distress and a tragic suicide rate.
As Hemen Parekh noted in his October 2024 blog Kota: Our Suicide Capital, the
system extracts the most vulnerable years of a young person's life and returns,
at best, an entrance rank — and at worst, a broken spirit.
The no-detention
policy, now scrapped, briefly tried to reduce examination anxiety. Its removal
without replacement leaves students more exposed than before. What was needed
was never less assessment — it was better assessment: assessment that rewards
thinking, not recall.
2.3 The NEET-JEE Monoculture
The dominance of
NEET and JEE as the singular gateways to elite careers has created a
monoculture of preparation. Students in Class 9 are already making subject
choices not based on aptitude or curiosity but on what maximises their entrance
exam probability. This narrows the nation's cognitive diversity at precisely
the moment — the formative teenage years — when breadth of curiosity should be
expanding.
The JEE
paper-leak crisis of 2024, which Parekh documented in JEE Exam: A Tragedy of
Errors, exposed not just administrative failure but the fragility of a system
that places all its weight on a single high-stakes moment. When that moment is
compromised, an entire cohort's year is lost.
2.4 The Teacher's Dilemma
It is fashionable
to blame teachers. It is also unfair. A government schoolteacher managing 60
students in a single room, responsible for covering the syllabus before board
exams, has neither the time nor the institutional support to teach Socratic
dialogue. Critical thinking competitions, as the Times of India report notes,
inspire educators — but inspiration is not infrastructure. Teachers need tools
that make thinking-oriented pedagogy as easy to deliver as a textbook lesson.
3. What Critical Thinking Competitions Can — and Cannot — Do
The Times Critical
Thinking Championship 2025 felicitated India's top 35 student critical
thinkers. That is a worthy achievement. Competitions do several things well:
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They signal societal
legitimacy — critical thinking is valued, not just marks.
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They create role models and
exemplars for teachers and parents.
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They provide structured
environments where unconventional thinking is rewarded rather than penalised.
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They inspire educators to
move beyond information-transfer toward exploration.
But competitions
have hard structural limits:
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Scale: India has 1.5
million schools. A national competition touches a fraction of a percent of the
student population.
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Frequency: A competition
happens once a year. Thinking is a daily habit, not an annual event.
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Access: Competitions disproportionately
reach urban, English-medium, well-resourced schools. The rural student in a
government school in Bihar or Odisha is structurally excluded.
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Incentive alignment: A
competition medal does not translate into board exam marks, so neither student
nor teacher has a sustained incentive to prioritise thinking skills.
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A
competition is a showcase. A platform is an ecosystem. India needs the
ecosystem — and it already exists.
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4. The My-Teacher.in Solution: BriBoToMo
4.1 Genesis and Philosophy
Hemen Parekh —
who launched his blog on his 80th birthday in 2013 and who, approaching his
93rd year, continues to write with undiminished energy — conceived
My-Teacher.in as the answer to a simple question: how do you bring Edward de
Bono's Cognitive Research Trust (CoRT) Thinking Programme to every Indian
child's mobile phone?
De Bono's CoRT
programme, used by millions of students globally, teaches structured thinking
tools — PMI (Plus, Minus, Interesting), CAF (Consider All Factors), OPV (Other
People's Views), and dozens more. It has been proven to shift classrooms from
answer-retrieval to question-generation. But it requires trained teachers and
physical infrastructure that most Indian schools lack.
Parekh's insight:
the smartphone already in the hands of 600 million Indians is sufficient
infrastructure. He called his programme BriBoToMo — Bring Bono to Mobile. The
result is My-Teacher.in.
4.2 Core Features
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Feature
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What it Does
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Questions
Beyond Syllabus
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Generates
curiosity-provoking, cross-disciplinary WHY questions across science, math,
philosophy, and daily life — tuned for any age group
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294
Quintillion Unique Test Papers
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AI-generated
question papers where no two students ever see the same paper — making
copying structurally impossible while maintaining equal difficulty
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Mock Tests
with Equal Difficulty
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AI ensures
that while every paper is unique, all carry identical difficulty weighting —
fair to every student
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NEET / JEE /
CUET / SAFAL Practice
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Structured
practice for major national examinations — at home, at any hour, with
immediate feedback
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SARAL Mode
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Designed for
students with no teacher and no textbook — voice-input, simplified
navigation, mother-tongue support
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Text-to-Speech
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Converts
questions and explanations to audio — accessible to visually impaired and
low-literacy users
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Zero Cost /
Zero Registration
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Fully free.
No login. No data collection. Accessible via any browser on any device.
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4.3 The WHY Pedagogy in Action
The platform's
most distinctive feature is its Questions Beyond Syllabus module, which
operationalises Parekh's central pedagogical conviction: that teaching a child
to ask WHY is more valuable than teaching any specific answer. Sample questions
generated by the platform include:
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Why are mountains narrow at
the peak and wide at the base — and not the other way around?
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When standing on the
surface of Earth, we do not fall off — but why does this same logic break down
if we imagine standing inside a hollow Earth?
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Mixing the seven colours of
light gives white, but mixing the seven colours of paint gives brown. Why?
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In distant space, do the
concepts of left, right, up, and down have any meaning? Why?
These questions
have no past-year-paper equivalents. They cannot be Googled. They require the
student to construct an answer from first principles — which is precisely what
21st-century employers, and 21st-century citizenship, demand.
4.4 The Anti-Copying Architecture
Parekh identified
examination copying as both a symptom and a cause of the rote-learning crisis.
When the same paper is handed to every student in a room, copying is rational.
His solution is architectural: make the paper itself unique. With over 294
quintillion possible question combinations, the My-Teacher.in system ensures
that no two adjacent students can ever share an identical paper. This is not
surveillance — it is design. The approach parallels how Microsoft's MCSE online
certification has operated for decades, as Parekh documented in his comparison
of My-Teacher with MCSE exam formats.
4.5 Positioning Against the
Competition
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Platform /
Programme
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Reach
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Critical
Thinking Focus
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BYJU'S /
Vedantu
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Urban, paid
subscribers
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Exam prep,
not thinking
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DIKSHA (Govt)
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Wide but
passive
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Content
delivery only
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ATAL
Tinkering Labs
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500,000
students
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Making, not
reasoning
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Coaching Apps
(Kota model)
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Exam-focused
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Anti-thinking
by design
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Times CTCC
Competition
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~35 winners
nationally
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Annual, not
daily
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My-Teacher.in
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Any
smartphone, anywhere, free
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Thinking-FIRST,
always-on
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5. The Equity Argument: Leapfrogging the Digital Divide
India's education
reform discourse often focuses on infrastructure: classrooms, toilets,
electricity, broadband. My-Teacher.in requires none of these beyond a basic
smartphone and intermittent connectivity. With 750 million smartphone users and
counting, the infrastructure argument against digital learning has largely
collapsed.
Parekh's 2025
blog How to Leapfrog the Digital Divide in Schools articulates this directly:
the 150-gram mobile phone can replace the 6,000-gram school bag. Every subject,
every question bank, every thinking exercise — compressed into a device the
child already carries.
The implications
for equity are profound:
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A tribal student in a
Jharkhand village school has access to the same quality of thinking-provocation
as a student at Delhi Public School.
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A first-generation learner
with no access to coaching classes can practice the same creative-question
module as a Kota aspirant.
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A student with visual
impairment can use the Text-to-Speech feature without requiring any specialist
intervention.
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"Let
the 150 gm Mobile replace the 6,000 gm Schoolbag." — Hemen Parekh,
August 2024
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This is not
aspiration. The platform is live. The question is whether policy will follow
technology — or continue to lag a decade behind it.
6. The AI Dimension: From Tutor to Thinking Partner
6.1 AI-Powered Personalisation
Parekh's December
2024 blog AI-Powered Tutor articulates the next evolution of My-Teacher.in: an
AI layer that does not merely generate questions but adapts to the individual
learner's pace, prior answers, and cognitive patterns. Where a traditional
teacher must divide attention across 60 students, an AI tutor gives undivided
attention to one — indefinitely, patiently, without fatigue.
This is not
science fiction in 2026. The large language models powering platforms like
Claude, ChatGPT, and DeepSeek can engage in extended Socratic dialogue, push
back on weak reasoning, and redirect a student toward a better-framed question.
Parekh has documented his dialogues with multiple AI systems — including Claude
— asking each to contribute to the cause of Indian education reform.
6.2 AI-Generated Creative Questions:
A Live Demonstration
The platform's
Question Generation module, originally described in Parekh's 2025 blog
Generation of Questions / Topics Using BARD, has been progressively upgraded.
The module can generate questions on any topic — from photosynthesis to
geopolitics — that are specifically designed to have no single correct answer,
to reward reasoning over recall, and to connect the subject to the student's
lived experience.
6.3 AI-Resistant Assessment
A frequent
objection to AI in education is that students will use AI to cheat.
My-Teacher.in's unique-paper architecture, combined with AI-generated WHY
questions that require original reasoning, creates an assessment environment
that is structurally resistant to AI-assisted cheating. A student who pastes a
WHY question into ChatGPT and submits the response will be demonstrably
out-of-pattern against their own previous answers — and, more importantly, will
have missed the point of the exercise entirely.
The future of
assessment, as Parekh argues in The Future of Exams: Unique Question Papers, is
not less technology — it is smarter technology. AI that generates questions
makes copying irrelevant; AI that assesses responses makes marking objective.
The result is a system that rewards thinking rather than transcription.
7. Policy Recommendations
7.1 For the Ministry of Education
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Formally evaluate
My-Teacher.in under the National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with
Understanding and Numeracy (NIPUN) and the PM SHRI school modernisation
programme.
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Pilot the platform in 1,000
government schools across five states, with structured assessment of
thinking-skill improvement over one academic year.
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Mandate the inclusion of at
least one Questions Beyond Syllabus session per week in the timetable of every
Central Government school — requiring no additional teacher training, since the
platform is self-serve.
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Commission NCERT to
formally review My-Teacher.in's question-generation methodology for alignment
with the new National Curriculum Framework (NCF 2023) emphasis on
competency-based education.
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Remove copyright barriers
on textbook content so that platforms like My-Teacher.in can legally use
curriculum material to generate cross-disciplinary questions — as Parekh argued
in his blog No Copyright for Text Books.
7.2 For NITI Aayog
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Include AI-powered
thinking-skill platforms in the next iteration of the India Innovation Index as
a measurable indicator of educational ecosystem quality.
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Commission a study
comparing learning outcomes in schools using My-Teacher.in versus control
schools — structured as a randomised controlled trial using ASER-style
assessments.
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Recognise www.My-Teacher.in
as a Digital Public Good under India's DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure)
framework, alongside DIKSHA and SWAYAM.
7.3 For Corporate India (CSR)
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Replace donation of
physical infrastructure (benches, fans, computers) with donation of Interactive
Panels pre-loaded with My-Teacher.in — as detailed in Parekh's July 2024 open
letter Yes, Your Company Can Donate an Interactive Panel to a Village School.
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Fund a national
train-the-trainer programme to help government school teachers integrate the
platform's thinking modules into their daily lessons.
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Sponsor a My-Teacher.in
Critical Thinking League — a continuous, school-based thinking competition that
runs year-round rather than culminating in a single annual event.
7.4 For Examination Boards (CBSE /
State Boards / NTA)
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Adopt the
unique-question-paper architecture for board examinations — a technically
feasible reform that eliminates mass copying without requiring surveillance
infrastructure.
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Introduce a compulsory Critical
Reasoning section (20 marks) in Class 10 and Class 12 board examinations, for
which My-Teacher.in's WHY-questions module is direct preparation.
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Replace past-year question
paper practice — which rewards pattern recognition — with My-Teacher.in's dynamic
question bank as the official practice resource.
8. A Vision for 2030: India's Thinking Generation
Edward de Bono
estimated that if his CoRT Thinking Programme were universally adopted,
measurable improvements in societal problem-solving would appear within one
generation. India does not have a generation to wait. The automation wave is
already displacing routine cognitive work. The jobs that will remain — and the
ones that will be created — require exactly the skills that My-Teacher.in is
designed to build: synthesis, curiosity, lateral reasoning, comfort with
ambiguity.
The vision for
2030:
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250 million school-going
children with access to an AI-powered thinking platform — free, always-on,
multilingual.
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Board examinations that
reward reasoning over recall — with unique AI-generated papers for every
student.
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A generation of graduates
who have been trained from childhood to ask WHY — not just WHAT and HOW MUCH.
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India's global ranking in
PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) moving from the bottom
quartile to the global median — driven not by rote improvement but by genuine
cognitive development.
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"There
is just no time to look back, no time to wonder, 'Will anyone read these
pages?' " — Hemen Parekh, launching his blog on his 80th birthday, June
27, 2013. He has not stopped writing since.
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My-Teacher.in is
Parekh's life's work compressed into a mobile platform. It is built. It is
free. It works. What it needs is not more development — it needs adoption.
9. Call to Action
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Stakeholder
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Next Step
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Ministry of
Education
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Write to
feedback@My-Teacher.in to schedule a platform demonstration for NCERT/CBSE
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NITI Aayog
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Include
My-Teacher.in in the next round of the EdTech Innovation Challenge under Atal
Innovation Mission
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Corporate CSR
Teams
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Commission an
Interactive Panel donation drive targeting 500 government schools in 2026–27
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Principals
& Teachers
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Visit
www.My-Teacher.in today — no registration, no cost — and assign one
WHY-question session per week
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Parents
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Open
My-Teacher.in on your phone, select Questions Beyond Syllabus, and do it with
your child tonight
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Journalists
& Policy Thinkers
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Ask why
India's most ambitious free education platform has not yet received a single
line of government funding
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10. About the Author
Hemen Parekh
began his career as a pioneer of the Indian recruitment industry, founding one
of India's first job portals in the early internet era. He has written over
50,000 documents across his professional life — blogs, open letters, policy
proposals, and poems — all accessible via www.HemenParekh.ai, his personal
Small Language Model trained on six decades of his own writing.
He conceived
My-Teacher.in as a gift to India's 250 million school-going children — free,
forever, with no commercial motive. He has written to Prime Ministers,
Education Ministers, IIT Directors, and corporate leaders about it. He launched
his blog on his 80th birthday, invited readers on his 90th birthday to continue
chatting with his digital avatar after his physical departure, and shows no
sign of slowing down approaching his 93rd year.
He is reachable
at: feedback@My-Teacher.in
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Key
Links
Platform: www.My-Teacher.in
Digital Avatar: www.HemenParekh.ai
AGI Platform:
www.IndiaAGI.ai
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Blog
Archive (My-Teacher theme)
70+ posts, July 2024 – February 2025
myblogepage.blogspot.com
Contact:
feedback@My-Teacher.in
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This white paper may be freely reproduced
and shared with attribution.
