A legal op-ed today makes the case that India's real AI-era problem isn't access, it's that we never taught people to doubt convincing content

Published on SCC Online today, by Thajaswini C.B. (Supreme Court advocate) and Madhabendu Chakraborty. The core argument: India solved the digital access problem (UPI, cheap smartphones, broadband), but that success obscured a different gap opening up underneath it, most people were never taught to question what a screen shows them, and that's now the actual vulnerability as AI-generated voice, video and text get convincing enough to exploit it directly.

They open with a real case, a Hyderabad woman transferred ₹1.4 lakh after an AI-cloned voice, accent and all, convinced her it was her nephew in a car accident needing urgent help. Not a hypothetical, an India Today-reported incident from 2023 that's aged into exactly the pattern they're describing.

The stats worth sitting with: only around 38% of Indian households have someone who can independently use the internet, dropping to roughly 1 in 4 in rural India, per Ideas for India research. And the digital literacy gap tracks income sharply, 17% in the lowest income quartile versus 77%+ in the highest. Their framing: India's inequality is increasingly about cognitive resilience, not just access or wealth.

The piece also makes a workforce point worth separating from the misinformation angle: they argue the valuable skill in an AI-saturated economy won't be knowing how to use AI, it'll be knowing when to doubt its output, spot bias, or catch a fabrication. Trained scepticism as a literal economic skill, not just a civic one.

Their proposed fix is structural, not individual: AI-literacy and verification training built into teacher training and school curriculum from the start, not a bolt-on elective, plus using India's existing Common Service Centre network as a place to teach deepfake/scam detection to the groups least equipped for it right now. They explicitly reject "just teach yourself to be careful" as a strategy, arguing India's literacy history shows individual self-education never scaled, state-backed schooling did.

Genuinely well-argued piece for a legal blog, worth a full read if this is your area. Curious whether people think "digital judgment as curriculum" is actually implementable at the scale they're describing, or if it's the kind of policy idea that sounds right and never survives contact with an actual classroom.