PrepGraph Council

The Council

What this Council is, and what it refuses to be

The Council's public argument: why it exists, what it refuses to do, who pays for it, and what a school leader is being asked to lend a name to. It has no members and no findings, and this paper is itself a founding draft.

Founding Chair
Ms. Sri Lakshmi
Inaugural term
Inaugural term 2026–27
Convened & funded by
PrepGraph
Standing
Voluntary · Non-statutory
Status

The Council is being constituted. Its founding cohort is forming and no Council publication, roundtable or research output has yet been produced. Everything described as planned is a commitment of intent, not a record of work done.

01 · The description

The description the Council will answer to, and the standing it claims.

What the Council is

The PrepGraph Council for Responsible AI & School Innovation – India is a national forum advancing responsible, research-led AI innovation in Indian schools. It intends to bring together school leaders, teachers, researchers and specialists to do a narrow kind of work: agree language, write practice guidance a school can adopt or amend, ask harder questions of technology, and build an Indian evidence base on what AI actually does to learning. Its mission, stated in full:

To help build an Indian education system strengthened by responsible, research-led AI innovation — preparing students, teachers and institutions for an AI-enabled future by advancing responsible adoption, educator capability, academic innovation, student safety, research evidence and ethical governance.
The mission as adopted. Quoted here rather than paraphrased, because it is the sentence the Council will be measured against.

Its output is documents and convenings, not services. Membership is honorary, carries no fee, and confers no commercial benefit of any kind. Anyone may nominate anyone, including themselves, and the Founding Chair appoints the first cohort against published criteria. Nobody has yet been invited or appointed. Founding membership is capped at twelve Founding Members alongside the Founding Chair, and the seats are architected rather than uniform: three for school leadership, two for teacher development and pedagogy, two for responsible AI and technology, and one each for child development and age-appropriate use, equity and inclusion, school innovation and education policy and systems, with one independent at-large seat. A body made up only of school operators friendly to its convener would be a customer advisory board; that mix is what is intended to make this a national forum instead. The inaugural term is 2026-27, twelve months from the Founding Chair's acceptance on 29 August 2026. Ms. Sri Lakshmi is Founding Chair, in an honorary and non-executive capacity. PrepGraph convenes the Council as founding organisation, research and knowledge partner, and secretariat; secretariat staff are not members, hold no vote, and cannot approve a Council document. The three secretariat offices are named rather than anonymous — Umesh Sharma as Founder & Executive Convener, Rekha Sharma as Executive Director & Secretary-General, and Anisha Sarkar as Director, Education Partnerships & National Outreach, each of them employed by PrepGraph — and none of the officers holding them votes on any question or counts towards quorum.

Membership is not endorsement, and the Charter says so in the article that creates it: "Membership of the Council does not constitute endorsement of PrepGraph or any technology vendor. Members participate in their individual professional capacity to advance responsible, ethical and evidence-informed use of AI and innovation in school education." A person who joins is not being recruited as a reference for a product.

As of this writing the Council has no members, no completed activities, no findings and no research output. It does not follow that nothing has been written. Eight founding instruments, this paper among them, are issued under Article 17 of the Charter, which names an exhaustive class of documents that may be issued before the Council is constituted and requires each to carry the same stamp on its face: "Founding draft. Issued by the Founding Chair on the secretariat's drafting, before the Council was constituted. Open for comment. To be reaffirmed, amended or withdrawn by the voting members once seven are in office, and in any case by 31 August 2027." They should be read as the convener's drafting, approved by the Founding Chair and open to correction, and not as the settled view of a body that has yet to meet. Article 4's bar, which permits nothing to be issued in the Council's name while fewer than seven voting members are in office, then governs everything published after this founding set.

The Council's standing should be stated in the same words wherever it is described:

Standing

The Council is a voluntary, non-statutory initiative. It is not a government, regulatory or accrediting body, and it does not certify, rate or approve schools, curricula or products.

It holds no authority over any school and seeks none. Where it refers to public policy instruments that Indian schools already work within, such as NEP 2020 or the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, it does so as context for a school's existing obligations, and not as any claim of endorsement, approval or affiliation.

02 · The argument

Why neither a vendor, a circular nor a training programme can do this particular work.

Why a council, and why now

Three kinds of body already speak to schools about AI, and each is structurally unable to do this particular job. A vendor may publish a standard, but a standard written by a vendor is in the end a description of its own product, and schools discount it correctly. A circular can set a rule, but it arrives after the practice has already formed, applies uniformly to unlike schools, and states what is prohibited rather than what is good; it also cannot be argued with, which is what a school most needs to do while it is still deciding. A training programme can change one teacher, which matters, but it leaves no institutional artefact behind: when the teacher transfers, the capability transfers with her.

A convening body can do four things that none of those can. Hold a room in which principals say to one another what none of them will say from a stage. Settle vocabulary, so that a claim becomes comparable between two schools. Write a floor of practice with no commercial interest in the answer, and place the reasoning in public where it can be attacked. And frame research questions that no single school can afford to answer alone and no vendor can be trusted to mark its own answer to.

The argument for doing this now is not momentum. It is that defaults harden. The AI policies Indian schools write this session will be copied, adapted and inherited for years, and most will be written in a hurry, after an incident or before an inspection. A floor of practice will exist within a few years either way. The open question is whether it is set by people who have run a school, or by procurement pressure and the first serious incident involving a child.

03 · Areas of work

The six pillars

The Council's work is organised under six pillars. They are not themes for a conference programme. Each exists because a school has a decision to make under it, and each is written to end in the question the decision actually turns on.

Pillar01 Responsible AI in Schools

The conditions under which a child may encounter AI in the school's name: privacy and what data leaves the campus, bias and whose language and examples a system treats as standard, transparency about when a machine is involved, age-appropriate use, human oversight of anything that touches a mark or a record, academic integrity, child safety, and the discipline of deciding what not to deploy at all. Little of this is technical work. It is the ordinary institutional work of stating in writing what the school permits, what it refuses, and who is answerable when the system is wrong.

The question it answers for a school

What must be in place before a single child uses an AI tool in this school's name?

Pillar02 Teacher AI Enablement

Teachers are being asked to supervise a technology nobody has explained to them. This pillar concerns what a teacher should understand about how these systems work, where they fail, and why a confident answer is not a correct one; and what productive use looks like in preparation, differentiation, feedback and assessment design. The position is augmentation, not replacement: return time to the part of teaching only a teacher can do, and make that gain measurable rather than asserted.

The question it answers for a school

What should a teacher here be able to do with AI by the end of this year, and how would we know that she can?

Pillar03 Student AI Readiness

Readiness is not the ability to prompt a chatbot, which most students already have and none were taught. It is the ability to judge: to notice when an answer is fluent and wrong, to check a source, to cite honestly, to declare what was machine-assisted, and to understand what a student gives up when she outsources the part of the work where the learning happens. This is closer to critical reading and academic honesty than to computing, and it belongs in ordinary subject teaching rather than in a separate period.

The question it answers for a school

What must a student be able to judge about a machine's answer, and at which stage do we teach it?

Pillar04 Academic Innovation

The academic uses that might actually be worth the disruption: identifying learning gaps early, formative assessment that informs teaching rather than only recording it, differentiated work for a class of mixed attainment, personalised practice, and new models of instruction where they are genuinely better rather than merely newer. The honest version of this work is narrow. Choose one teaching problem, define in advance what improvement would look like in this school's own marks and its own teachers' time, and be willing to conclude that it did not appear.

The question it answers for a school

Which teaching problem here is worth pointing this technology at first, and what result would count as a real improvement?

Pillar05 School Leadership & Governance

Adoption is a governance decision before it is an academic one. What a school should adopt and what it should decline, which policies it needs and who owns them, what belongs in a contract about data, exit and accountability, how parents are informed, how staff are trained, and how a tool is reviewed after a year and discontinued if it has not earned its place. Most of governance is the capacity to say no with reasons, in a season when saying yes is easier.

The question it answers for a school

What should this school adopt, what should it refuse, and what must be answered before anything is signed?

Pillar06 Research & Evidence

This pillar exists because the evidence a school is shown was mostly gathered elsewhere, by parties with an interest in the finding. It covers building an Indian evidence base under Indian conditions, research ethics where children are involved, open publication with method attached, and measurement designed to survive scrutiny from someone who would prefer the result to be false. Negative and null results are part of the record, not an embarrassment to be withheld.

The question it answers for a school

Is there Indian classroom evidence for the claim in front of me, and if not, what would it take to produce it?

Each pillar is argued as principle in the ten Principles and made observable, level by level, in the readiness Framework. Pillar six has an instrument of its own: the Research Agenda.

04 · Limits accepted at founding

Six limits, each of which can be checked against published work rather than taken on trust.

What the Council is not

Each of the following is a limit the Council accepts on itself at founding, and each can be checked by reading its published work rather than by trusting its intentions. Where a limit is breached, the evidence will be a document, and the document will be public.

The neutrality position is adopted as a standing rule and will appear in the same words on every Council document:

Neutrality

The Council does not endorse individual procurement decisions or technology vendors. Its role is to advance responsible AI readiness, educator capability and evidence-based innovation in schools.

Not a regulator
It issues no rules and imposes no obligations. Its guidance carries the authority of its reasoning and nothing else. A school is free to read it and do otherwise, and owes the Council no account of that.
Not an accreditor
There is no certification, no rating, no seal, no register of approved schools and no register of approved products. No school may describe itself as Council approved, and no vendor may describe a product that way. The Council will ask, in writing, for any such use to be withdrawn.
Not a buyers' club
The Council runs no group purchase, negotiates no discount, brokers no introduction to a seller and shortlists nothing. It will not circulate a list of recommended tools, publicly or privately.
Not a sponsorship platform
The Council accepts no sponsorship, exhibition fee, advertising, stall or speaking payment from any technology company, PrepGraph's competitors included. PrepGraph is at present its only funder, and that amount is published as a figure on the Charter's disclosure terms and again in the year-end statement.
Not a vendor's marketing arm
No Council instrument or guidance names a commercial product, PrepGraph included. The only exception is a research publication in which a named product is the object of study, and there the funding and participation are disclosed at the head of the document.
Not a voice for its members
Participation is not agreement with any Council document. A member may require that a dissenting note of up to three hundred words be printed alongside the output, under their name if they wish, unedited except for length and law. Until the first members accept, this control does not exist.

What a founding member commits to, and what membership can never be used for

05 · The conflict

The funder named on the page rather than in a footnote, and the six constraints meant to contain it.

Who convenes it, and what contains it

PrepGraph is an Indian education technology company that sells to schools. It founded the Council, funds it, staffs its secretariat and administers its work. The Council carries PrepGraph's name because concealing the connection would be worse than declaring it, but a disclosure settles nothing on its own; it only makes the conflict visible. The conflict is real: a company that sells to schools is convening the forum in which schools decide what to buy.

Until now the secretariat was described and not named, which is weaker than it looks: an unnamed office lets a funder's staff run a council with nobody answerable by name for what they do in it. Three offices are therefore named, with the commercial role stated in the same breath as the Council one. Umesh Sharma is Founder & Executive Convener, and is Founder & CEO of PrepGraph. Rekha Sharma is Executive Director & Secretary-General, and is PrepGraph's Chief Operating Officer. Anisha Sarkar is Director, Education Partnerships & National Outreach, and works on education partnerships at PrepGraph. Naming them is a gain in transparency only if their limits are published as prominently as their mandates, so each office's mandate and the limits on it are published together, at the same length, at the address of record.

The line between the two bodies is stated in one sentence and quoted rather than paraphrased wherever they are described together: "The Council determines the recommendations and principles. The PrepGraph-supported Secretariat enables research, coordination, publication and implementation. The Secretariat holds no vote." None of the three officers votes on anything — not publication, not standards, not membership, not a vendor question — and none counts towards quorum. A partial bar, non-voting on vendor-specific or standards questions alone, was considered and rejected as too weak, because it invites an argument about which decisions counted. The Convener's own rule is written in the same terms: "The Executive Convener may contribute research, evidence and proposals. Council recommendations are determined collectively and are not subject to commercial approval by PrepGraph."

The effect of naming them, stated plainly rather than softened, is that PrepGraph is more present on this site than it was, not less. Three officers of the funder now appear by name, against one independent Chair whose appointment has been offered and not yet accepted and twelve independent seats that are vacant. That is the composition as it stands today, and a reader should be told it rather than left to discover it.

The funder's other activities are described here only so far as they bear on the conflict, and without naming a product or linking to one: "PrepGraph's activity has three parts: a commercial platform sold to schools, an internal research and development function, and this Council. The first two are commercial. This one is not, and the rules in the Charter and the independence policy are what hold the boundary."

What follows are the constraints that contain it. Each is a rule with a mechanism, not an assurance, and each can be tested by an outsider without the Council's cooperation.

  1. 1

    Approval sits with the Chair, not the funder

    The secretariat drafts. Nothing is published under the Council's name without the Founding Chair's written approval, and PrepGraph cannot publish, amend or withdraw a Council document on its own.

    Check: every published document carries its approval date.

  2. 2

    The secretariat is named, and holds no vote

    The three secretariat offices are named, and each holder is an employee of PrepGraph: Umesh Sharma, Founder & Executive Convener; Rekha Sharma, Executive Director & Secretary-General; Anisha Sarkar, Director, Education Partnerships & National Outreach. None of them holds a vote on publication, on standards, on membership, on a vendor question or on anything else; none counts towards quorum, so the Council is never quorate on the strength of its secretariat; and none sits on the ethics review panel. The Executive Convener withdraws when the Council decides any matter in which PrepGraph has an interest, and every proposal he brings is minuted with its source named.

    Check: the minutes and the register of decisions record who voted on each question and at whose instance a matter came. A secretariat officer counted in a vote, or a quorum that reaches its number only by including one, is the breach to look for.

  3. 3

    The funder gets one pass over a draft, and it is logged

    PrepGraph has no editorial review. It receives one written factual-accuracy pass, limited to statements about its own systems, of ten working days. Silence publishes. Every comment it makes and every change that follows is logged and published with the output. It cannot delay, amend or withhold anything. Anyone who says the funder never sees a draft is describing something other than this arrangement: the secretariat that drafts is staffed by PrepGraph, and pretending otherwise would be the first thing a reader caught.

    Check: the log of PrepGraph's comments, and of the changes that followed, published with each output. An output carrying no log at all is the thing to ask about.

  4. 4

    No product is named

    No Council instrument or guidance names a commercial product, PrepGraph included, outside a research study of which that product is the object.

    Check: search any Council document for a product name.

  5. 5

    One funder, and no vendor money at all

    The Council takes no sponsorship, advertising, exhibition, stall or speaking payment from any technology company, including firms competing with PrepGraph. PrepGraph's annual contribution is published as a figure.

    Check: the figure in the year-end statement, or its absence.

  6. 6

    The Chair's independence is a condition of holding the chair

    The office is held on the condition that its holder has no shareholding, employment, commission, consultancy or procurement relationship with PrepGraph and takes no fee for the role. The condition is evidenced by a declaration of interests, published in the register before the first meeting and dated. Until that declaration is published, a reader should treat the condition as stated and not yet evidenced, because a claim about a person's financial affairs that nobody can check is worth what any such claim is worth. If the condition ceases to be met, the Chair stands down and the reason is published.

    Check: whether the declaration is in the register, and on what date it was published.

  7. 7

    Dissent is printed, not managed

    Any member may require that a dissenting note of up to three hundred words appear in the published document, under their name if they wish, unedited except for length and law. The control is real but it is not yet operative: until the first members accept, there is nobody to exercise it.

    Check: a year of instruments carrying no dissent at all is evidence of a problem, not of agreement.

  8. 8

    A stated failure condition

    If the Council is used to recommend a purchase, it has failed at the thing it was made for. Members are asked to say so publicly, and the Council will carry any such statement on its own page, unedited.

    Check: whether the statement appears, and how quickly.

Read the independence and conflict policy Who runs the Council, and what they cannot do

06 · For reuse

Copy a member may take and edit freely, and the two cautions that hold in every case.

Words you can reuse

When members and schools are asked, in corridors and on messaging groups, what this Council is, short answers travel and long ones do not. The following are offered for reuse and may be edited freely.

Two cautions

Two cautions hold in every case. Describe the Council as voluntary and non-statutory, never as an authority. And no school, member or vendor should use a phrase such as Council approved, Council certified or Council recommended, because no such status exists and none is planned.

The one-sentence description

The PrepGraph Council for Responsible AI & School Innovation is a voluntary, non-statutory national forum, convened and funded by PrepGraph, being constituted with school leaders, teachers and researchers to develop open guidance and Indian research on responsible AI use in schools; it does not certify schools, rate products or endorse vendors.

For reuse verbatim in a bio line, an introduction or a reply to a parent. The shorter form, a forum of school leaders, teachers and researchers, may not be used until members are in office, because until then it describes a composition that does not exist.

If you are asked whether it is government or board recognised

It is not. It is voluntary and non-statutory, it has no official standing with any government body or examination board, and it approves nothing and nobody.

Correct the framing rather than let it pass. Silence here is how a false claim becomes an assumption.

If you are asked what a member gets

No published document, no rating and no commercial advantage a non-member cannot have. The guidance is public and free. What a member gets is an early draft to argue with, and what a member gives is time and disagreement when the draft deserves it.

Useful when the question behind the question is whether membership is a commercial arrangement.

Short form: on evidence

Evidence before adoption.

The shortest form. Set under the Council name.

Short form: on the floor of practice

A floor of practice for AI in Indian schools, argued in public.

Best where the audience is principals, correspondents and trustees.

Where this becomes binding

This page argues the case. The charter is where it binds.

The Founding Charter sets the same commitments out article by article, including the ones that constrain PrepGraph, and the independence policy states the conflict without euphemism and names who may raise a breach. Both are published in full.

Read the Founding Charter Independence & conflict policy