10 Cents a Month Could Change Everything: AI, Access and Education

What does education look like when there are no schools and no teachers?

In this episode, we speak to Chandrima, a physicist who earned their PhD at Cambridge and held positions at Dartmouth and Harvard before making a radical career shift. During the pandemic, they stepped back from academia and into community organising, eventually founding DARS, an AI assisted tutoring platform designed for marginalised learners in West Bengal, India.

DARS operates at just 10 cents per student per month, runs on basic smartphones with limited connectivity, and is built around a peer mentoring model where every learner is also a teacher. It's not just an EdTech product. It's a community driven approach to closing an education gap that policy alone hasn't solved.

In this conversation we explore Chandrima's journey from research to real world impact, the disconnect between scientists and the communities they aim to serve, why gender justice and education are inseparable, and what it takes to build responsible AI for people who are usually excluded from the conversation entirely.

If you care about AI, education, equity or community led change, this one's for you.

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