New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Schools Chancellor Kamar H. Samuels, on September 2, 2026, unveiled sweeping curbs on AI use and screen time in the city’s public schools. As part of the policy, student-facing AI tools are now barred, for a year, for students from kindergarten through eighth grade. The new policy will impact over 600,000 students in one of the largest public school system in the U.S.
Rather than leaning into AI-assisted learning, the city is doubling down on teaching children how these systems work, alongside age-calibrated screen time limits.
As India has no equivalent policy on the use of AI systems in schools, it should pay close attention to what is about to happen in over thousands of public schools in New York City as learning from there could be a good starting point to formulate policies that nurture learning and curb unnecessary use of gadgets in schools.
Mr. Mamdani’s measures come at time when educators around the world are worried about the unchecked rollout of AI technologies in schools even as teenagers are increasing spending more time scrolling social media posts outside school.
India’s woes
India’s version of that worry is backed by even starker numbers. ASER’s 2024 survey found that 82.2% of all children in the age group 14-16 said they know how to operate a smartphone, but only a little over half use it for anything educational, while a clear majority use it mainly for social media.
In urban India, close to half of parents report their children are spending more than three hours a day on social media, video platforms, and gaming.
India is facing a structural problem as teen digital addiction is on the rise. This year’s Economic Survey point out this ominous trend, describing it as carrying real economic and social costs.
New York’s policy is not a simple on-off switch on gadgets and AI. It goes after AI chatbots outright, at every grade level, but it also reaches into AI features quietly embedded inside tools schools already use for reading, writing, and math.
For the youngest children, in pre-kindergarten through second grade, the city is effectively removing one-to-one devices from classrooms. Third to fifth graders face a recommended cap of 30 minutes of screen time a day; middle schoolers, 45 minutes. High schoolers get a narrower carve-out: a small, vetted set of AI tools in pilot programmes, paired with twice-yearly modules on how the technology works, what it gets wrong, and where its limits lie.
Teachers can still use AI for lesson planning and translation, but not for grading, behaviour monitoring, special-education planning, or anything touching student mental health.
Baseline and device deficit
To get started on framing a policy in India, the baseline of one-to-one devices must be estimated. This is likely to be low in India when compared to the US where most classrooms are well-resourced with the latest tech.
The device deficit in Indian schools is a blessing in disguise as it enables more qualified educators to teach students essential, foundational subjects like math and science that form the bedrock of modern computing and AI algorithms. Understanding how these systems are built will help students create new technologies than simply be passive consumers. As more teachers join the school system, the ratio of educators to students increases, enabling more qualitative classroom discussions.
Such a change can create better outcomes in schools. But it will only solve one part of the problem — devices in schools. The other aspect is the pervasive use of smartphones by children at home. Most homes are now loaded with various display gadgets that are built for engagement, not learning. Spending more time on those devices can cause significant problems in the long run.
New York’s Chancellor Samuels has already conceded the hardest truth about this kind of policy: schools have almost no control over what happens on a child’s personal phone once the last bell rings.
Smartphone menace
India’s smartphone ownership is exploding, and unlike New York, where the policy debate is confined to a single, well-resourced school system, India’s children are logging on across an enormous range of device access, parental supervision, and digital literacy.
A national or state-level classroom policy that ignores what happens after school hours is like treating a symptom while leaving the underlying digital ecosystem untouched.
This is where the American Academy of Pediatrics’ policy statement on children’s digital ecosystems is instructive, and where the New York model is arguably too narrow.
The AAP’s framing is that a child’s relationship with technology cannot be reduced to screen-time minutes in a classroom; it has to be understood as a nested system running from the child’s own characteristics, through their caregivers, out to the platforms themselves, and finally to the policies and institutions around all of it.
The AAP’s own researchers argue that most digital platforms are engineered to maximise engagement rather than a child’s wellbeing, and that responsibility for that design sits with industry and policymakers, not just with parents setting screen-time limits at home.
New York’s school-based ban addresses one node in that system — the classroom. India, precisely because its out-of-school digital exposure is so much larger relative to its in-school exposure, cannot afford to stop there.
Any serious Indian policy needs to pair classroom restrictions with platform-level design rules, data-protection safeguards for minors, and public digital-literacy campaigns that reach families, not just schools.
Mr. Mamdani’s administration is betting that children build reasoning, judgment, and social skills more reliably through unmediated time with teachers and peers than through AI-assisted shortcuts. That bet runs against an ed-tech industry that has spent years trying to make AI tutors as unremarkable a classroom fixture as the calculator.
India faces the identical tension, amplified by scale with a booming domestic ed-tech sector with every incentive to embed AI deeper into schooling, and a generation of students already showing signs of screen dependence that predates any classroom AI tool.
The lesson from New York is that any credible response has to be age-tiered, aimed at embedded AI as much as visible chatbots, backed by a real evaluation mechanism, and built with as much attention to what happens on how the child spends their time past school time. India currently has the worse numbers and the weaker safety net. It should not wait for a crisis in every before it acts.
Published – September 11, 2026 08:00 am IST
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