This chapter critically examines the proliferation of unregulated corporate social responsibility (CSR) and EdTech interventions in India’s public schooling, tracing how these externally driven experiments often undermine pedagogical depth and local contexts. Drawing on authors’ own fieldworks, evolving policy landscape, and critical theoretical perspectives, this chapter explores how neoliberal policy imperatives, major underfunding, and inadequate regulatory frameworks enable the rapid entry of non-state actors, privileging measurable outputs over sustained engagement or democratic accountability. There is a marked preference toward technocratic and output-driven models that disregard concern for processes and student, teacher, and community voices. They tend to reduce teachers to mere facilitators and students to data points. This chapter foregrounds the significance of empowering educators and communities to reclaim schools as transformative pedagogical spaces, rather than passive sites of external experimentation. The analysis aims to encourage a dialogue on developing robust frameworks that foreground theoretically informed, participatory, and culturally rooted pedagogies.