The Future of AI, Education and Economics: Policy Recommendations for a Sustainable Knowledge Society

Three transformations are unfolding in India simultaneously, and this chapter argues that none of them can be fully understood, or wisely governed, in isolation from the other two. Artificial intelligence has moved, within a single decade, from a specialised research pursuit to a general-purpose technology reshaping how India teaches, works, and grows; the National Education Policy 2020 has committed the country to becoming a "knowledge society" through an ambitious, still-unfinished restructuring of school and higher education; and India's economic-policy establishment has begun treating AI-enabled growth and human-capital formation as a single connected project rather than two separate portfolios. This chapter synthesises evidence across all three domains - India's AI institutional architecture (the IndiaAI Mission, the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence, and the 2026 India AI Impact Summit's New Delhi Declaration), NEP 2020's knowledge-economy targets (a fifty-per-cent higher-education Gross Enrolment Ratio by 2035, the National Credit Framework, and India's research-investment shortfall), and the international literature on AI, automation, and human capital formation - to assess how close India actually is to the "sustainable knowledge society" its own policy documents describe. It finds a pattern familiar from this volume's sector-specific chapters repeated here at macro scale: ambitious institutional design substantially outrunning measured, funded delivery, evident in an AI mission that has disbursed under four per cent of its five-year outlay and a research-and-development investment rate roughly a quarter of the level comparable innovation economies sustain. Rather than treating this gap as merely descriptive, the chapter closes with a dedicated set of policy recommendations addressed to the specific, evidenced shortfalls the preceding sections identify, arguing that closing the disbursement-and-delivery gap, not further expanding institutional ambition, is what now stands between India's stated knowledge-society vision and its realisation.