Australia has funded a new robotics laboratory at a government school in New Delhi, the latest addition to a growing list of education initiatives connecting the two countries beyond university partnerships and student mobility agreements.
Australia’s Deputy High Commissioner to India, Nick McCaffrey, inaugurated the Robotics STEM Lab at Rao Balram Public School in Najafgarh on the outskirts of Delhi, describing the initiative as an investment in the next generation of innovators.
“What a wonderful day with students at Rao Balram Public School: so much energy and optimism!” McCaffrey said. “Happy to launch a new Robotics STEM Lab, funded by Australia and set up by our partner India STEM. Investing in young minds today will deliver innovators tomorrow.”
How the lab came together
The laboratory was established through Australian funding in partnership with the India STEM Foundation, a not-for-profit working to expand access to science, technology, engineering and mathematics education in India. The Delhi lab forms part of the Foundation’s broader mission to democratise STEM education by equipping schools with free STEM Innovation Kits designed for hands-on learning, robotics and coding.
What is a STEM Innovation Kit?
A STEM Innovation Kit, as provided by the India STEM Foundation, is a set of hardware components that allows students to design, build and test their own robotic and electronic projects. Each kit typically includes Arduino Uno and Nano microcontrollers, ultrasonic and infrared sensors, servo and DC motors, breadboards and jumper wires. Rather than teaching robotics through theory alone, the kits are built around experiential learning, where students physically assemble circuits and write code to control sensors and motors, building practical problem-solving skills alongside technical knowledge.The India STEM Foundation targets schools that do not already have STEM infrastructure, prioritising government and lower-resourced schools over institutions that may already have access to similar equipment.
The programme specifically prioritises schools that lack existing STEM infrastructure, a deliberate targeting choice that positions government schools like Rao Balram Public School, rather than well-resourced private institutions, as the primary beneficiaries of Australian funding.
How this connects to India’s education reforms
The initiative is explicitly framed as supporting India’s National Education Policy 2020, which emphasises critical thinking, creativity and technology-enabled education as core pillars of the country’s schooling reform agenda. By combining robotics, innovation and experiential learning, the Delhi lab is designed to give students at a government school direct, hands-on exposure to the kind of technology-enabled learning environment NEP 2020 envisions for Indian classrooms nationally.
The Delhi lab arrives at a moment of intense activity around STEM education infrastructure in Indian government schools more broadly. In June 2026, Delhi’s own government announced partnerships with four institutions, Delhi Technological University, Delhi Skill and Entrepreneurship University, Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University for Women and IIIT Delhi, to provide mentorship and laboratory access to students in the city’s CM SHRI government schools. In December 2025, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman launched a separate set of AI, STEM and robotics laboratories in government schools in Karnataka, describing them as tools to build “early digital fluency, computational thinking and innovation capacity” among students.
Against that backdrop, the Australia-funded Delhi lab is one contribution within a much larger, nationally coordinated push toward classroom-level STEM infrastructure across India’s public school system.
Why this matters for the India-Australia relationship
The robotics lab is a modest but symbolically significant addition to a year of accelerating India-Australia education and technology cooperation. It follows the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Emerging Technologies announcement in Tamil Nadu, the PACTS technology partnership signed at the Modi-Albanese summit in Melbourne, and Mission ShakthiSAT’s selection of four Australian schoolgirls for an India-led satellite programme, all occurring within the same several-week window.
Where those initiatives operate at the level of universities, national frameworks and elite STEM competitions, the Rao Balram Public School lab operates at the opposite end of the education pipeline: a single government school classroom in Najafgarh, where students without prior access to robotics equipment now have Arduino microcontrollers and sensors to build with.
Nick McCaffrey X Account
What Indian-Australian families and educators should know
Is this lab open only to Rao Balram Public School students, or will Australia fund similar labs elsewhere in India?
The current lab is specifically located at Rao Balram Public School in Najafgarh. It operates within the India STEM Foundation’s wider programme, which prioritises government and lower-resourced schools across India that do not already have STEM infrastructure. Whether further Australian-funded labs are planned at additional Indian schools has not been separately confirmed.
What equipment do students actually get to use?
Each STEM Innovation Kit includes Arduino Uno and Nano microcontrollers, ultrasonic and infrared sensors, servo and DC motors, breadboards and jumper wires, allowing students to design, build and test their own robotic projects rather than learning robotics through theory alone.
How does this fit into India’s National Education Policy 2020?
NEP 2020 emphasises critical thinking, creativity and technology-enabled education as central reform priorities for Indian schooling. The robotics lab is explicitly framed by its funders as supporting these goals by giving students direct, hands-on exposure to coding and robotics rather than purely theoretical instruction.
Who is the India STEM Foundation?
The India STEM Foundation is the not-for-profit partner organisation that established and equipped the lab using Australian funding, as part of its broader mission to expand access to STEM education across Indian schools that currently lack such infrastructure.
