Inside India’s Hands-On Learning Gap
It was inside one such lab that a group of government school students began a journey that would eventually take them abroad.
By : DC Correspondent
Update: 2025-11-21 17:37 GMT
Across India, tinkering labs are reshaping how students engage with science and technology, but only for a small fraction of them. Since 2016, over 10,000 Atal Tinkering Labs (ATLs) have been set up, reaching an estimated 10 million students. Yet with 1.5 million schools nationwide, hands-on learning remains far from universal.
Education experts say this gap is significant at a time when India is pushing for stronger STEM foundations and preparing students for an economy projected to reach $7 trillion by 2030. Assessments show that most ATLs are heavily used where they exist, but tinkering still functions as an add-on activity rather than a core part of classroom learning.
“Tinkering labs offer something most Indian classrooms still lack, the freedom to explore, test ideas, and learn by doing. They build the curiosity and resilience that traditional rote learning often suppresses.” said Meenal Majumdar, founder of The Innovation Story.
It was inside one such lab that a group of government school students began a journey that would eventually take them abroad. In October, five students from modest public schools travelled to Panama City to represent India at the FIRST Global Challenge, an international robotics competition featuring teams from 193 countries.
Among them were Gouresh, who taught himself coding after school hours and became the team’s lead programmer, and Ningaraj, raised by a single mother in housekeeping, who worked on the robot’s mechanical design. Supported by mentors from the Amazon Future Engineer Makerspace, the team built a robot designed to help other robots navigate obstacles.
Their achievement, educators say, illustrates what becomes possible when access, mentorship, and hands-on practice come together. Majumdar added, “If tinkering is integrated into the school timetable, not treated as an occasional project, we democratize innovation for every child.
It ensures that talent from any background gets the chance to imagine, build, and lead.”
The growing interest in hands-on learning has prompted institutions to create more structured platforms for young innovators. Reflecting this shift, The Innovation Story and IIT Bombay have announced the National Robotics League, which officially launches on December 6 and will be held at IIT Bombay in December 2025. The league is expected to become India’s largest robotics competition for school students in grades 7–12.