Empowering India's Youth to Shape Tomorrow

What happens when young people refuse to be passive consumers of the future being built around them? The Youth Futures Studio (YFS) at Quest Alliance is flipping the script on how we think about youth, technology, and the future by asking a crucial question: How are megatrends like climate change and AI shaping young people's lives—and what futures do they want to inhabit?

Rather than accepting predetermined futures, YFS empowers young people to imagine and articulate alternatives. The studio operates on a simple but radical premise: futures exist only in our imagination, making them a powerful tool for understanding how megatrends will affect us. And crucially, no trend is destiny—at any moment, multiple possible futures exist, waiting to be shaped by the choices we make today.

More about the YFS program and our guests below the video

https://youtu.be/SweZpYX_iis

YFS focuses on three pillars:

1. Understanding how young people are experiencing megatrends
2. Building capacity of young people to imagine alternate futures through futures thinking pedagogy
3. Bring youth voices to the decision making table

The studio began with climate change, developing an emancipatory climate futures literacy pedagogy that helped young people move from individual understanding of climate issues to systemic thinking—and from there, to imagining their preferred climate futures. Now, YFS has turned its attention to another force reshaping young lives: artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. The team recognized something urgent: AI is already laying the foundations of the world young people will inhabit, yet these young people feel they have no agency in influencing that change. They feel trapped into passively accepting futures being decided for them.

YFS engaged with over 200 young people in government secondary schools and vocational training institutes to understand their digital lives. The results were striking: 2 out of 3 young people couldn't clearly define what Artificial Intelligence was—yet AI is already reshaping their education, employment prospects, and daily lives. Without reliable information or critical engagement tools, young people were making meaning of these technologies entirely on their own terms, filling the knowledge gap with whatever they could piece together.

The Response: Critical AI Futures Pedagogy

This gap led YFS to create a Critical AI Futures pedagogical framework that goes beyond simply teaching young people what AI is—it empowers them to engage critically and imagine differently. The framework enables young people to understand AI and situate it within their social context rather than seeing it as an abstract or inevitable force, articulate their anxieties about probable AI futures not to dwell in fear but to transform those anxieties into critical questions, challenge and reject dominant AI narratives that position them as passive users, imagine and articulate alternate community-centered AI futures, and ultimately claim agency to create their preferred futures rather than accepting what's handed to them.

This engagement culminated in something unprecedented: India's first Youth AI Charter: A Critical AI futures pedagogical framework that helps young people to:

1. Understand AI, engage with it critically and situate it in their social context
2. Enables them to articulate their anxieties about probable AI futures
3. Use anxiety as a site of transformation to challenge and question and reject the dominant AI narratives
4. Empowers them to imagine and articulate alternate AI futures which are community-centered
5. Empowers them with agency to imagine and create their preferred AI futures

In this document, young people refuse their assigned role as passive consumers of AI and instead articulate how AI should serve their communities and shape their lives. They propose a reversal of priorities—prioritizing care over efficiency, focusing on human and environmental wellbeing, centering labor dignity. Their vision is building a Viksit Bharat (Developed India) with a genuinely human, environment, and labor-centric approach to AI—not despite artificial intelligence, but by reshaping how it's developed and deployed.

The Youth Futures Studio's work reminds us that the future isn't written yet. Young people aren't just subjects of change—they're architects of possibility. By giving them the tools to think critically, imagine boldly, and articulate clearly, we're not just preparing them for the future but ensuring they have a hand in creating it.

Our guests

Bhawna Parmar: Bhawna is a researcher-designer working at the intersection of youth, digital cultures and participatory futures. She has set up and currently leads the Youth Futures Studio at Quest Alliance, India.

Tanvi Negi: Tanvi is the Director of Monitoring, Evaluation and Research at Quest Alliance.

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