CBSE’s credibility has unraveled in public, with blurred answer sheets, a revaluation portal that flipped fees from Re 1 to ₹69,420 in an afternoon, and a circular admitting “unauthorised interference”. Pradhan has brought four PSU banks and IIT Madras/Kanpur teams in to fix the portal mid-cycle. An independent researcher separately published a walkthrough showing the same portal could be broken into by anyone with a web browser. Meanwhile, upGrad has filed for CCI approval on its Unacademy buy at roughly 90% below the 2021 peak, Allen is going from 43 cities to 78 ahead of an IPO, and PhysicsWallah picked up Punjab’s first digital university licence. NTA has told Parliament that NEET wasn’t really leaked, French and German teachers are being pushed out of classrooms by the three-language rollout, and a fresh US Green Card memo is rerouting Indian students to Germany and Ireland.

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Spotlight

CBSE Grade 12 woes continue

CBSE’s first full-scale rollout of On-Screen Marking has unraveled in the open. The post-result portal opened on May 19 for verification, scanned answer books and re-evaluation, with the board promising lower fees and a smoother process: ₹100 for a scanned copy down from ₹700, ₹100 for verification down from ₹500, and ₹25 per question for re-checking. Within hours, students were posting screenshots of failed logins, “site under maintenance” errors and deducted payments showing as failed transactions . Controller of Examinations Sanyam Bhardwaj initially insisted the portal was “functioning properly”, told PTI he had himself submitted a dummy application successfully , and asked students to restart their computers.

That insistence did not survive the week. By May 20, the Answer Book portal was down again with technical glitches and CBSE had to push the application deadline. By May 21, students were sharing blurred scanned answer sheets they say they cannot read themselves and asking how teachers could have evaluated copies that were illegible. The same day, parents tagged CBSE with screenshots of payments that went through while the portal still showed “payment failed” . CBSE then had to publicly deny that it was using AI in evaluation , clarifying that OSM changes only the surface evaluators look at and that the marking scheme remains unchanged.

On May 22, the revaluation fee on the portal flipped from Re 1 to ₹69.67 to ₹8,000 to ₹69,420 per subject within a single afternoon , with one student posting that “your site was hacked, students were scammed”. The same day, Bhardwaj signed a circular extending the deadline from May 23 to May 24, admitting that the CBSE website “has been facing unprecedented traffic since the past few days and has also faced several attempts of unauthorised interference, which has made it prone to disruptions”.

The admission landed awkwardly against the board’s posture days earlier. CBSE’s May 18 OSM FAQ had rejected the blurred-images allegation by pointing to a three-level scanning quality check, clarified that examiners and not computers were checking answers, and dismissed claims of stricter marking.

By May 24, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan had walked into Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s office and asked for a complete overhaul of the CBSE payment gateway with SBI, Bank of Baroda, Canara Bank and Indian Bank stepping in , and asked IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur teams to fix portal stability, server performance and login authentication . A system that CBSE spent the spring preparing for, with a 4 lakh-viewer live webcast in February, a mass mock evaluation across five slots, and marking schemes uploaded for all 116 subjects, is now being audited mid-cycle by two engineering institutes.

What turned out to be running underneath the chaos was a portal that was structurally insecure. The same day CBSE was extending its deadline, Class 12 student and cybersecurity researcher Nisarga Adhikary published a walkthrough showing the OnMark evaluation portal CBSE uses could be broken into by almost anyone with a web browser : a single master password was sitting in plain text inside the site’s own publicly readable code, and the OTP that was supposed to act as a second security check was being sent to the user’s own browser to verify, which is roughly the same as asking the candidate to mark their own paper. With those flaws and a few related ones, a stranger could take over any examiner’s account and edit marks; Adhikary says he reported the bugs to CERT-In in late February and most went unpatched for months. Adhikary writes that the platform “seems” to have been built by Coempt EduTeck Pvt Ltd, and a widely-shared X post this week goes further, alleging the firm is the same tech vendor, operating under a changed name, that was behind Telangana’s 2019 results crisis, in which the post claims 300,000-plus students faced discrepancies and around 20 student suicides were linked to the fallout.

The board’s defence is that OSM is just a different surface for an unchanged evaluation; the lived experience for many students is that this is the first marking system that has visibly broken in public before the appeals window has even closed, with a separate question now opened about who built the platform in the first place.

Funding & Acquisitions

• upGrad has filed for CCI approval on its ₹2,060 crore Unacademy buy , with the valuation report pegging Ronnie Screwvala’s firm at $1.7 billion and Unacademy at roughly 90% below its $3.44 billion peak in 2021. upGrad swung to a ₹38 crore profit on ₹1,532 crore in revenue in the first 11 months of FY26, a sharp reversal from FY25’s ₹274 crore loss. Screwvala has also led a fresh ₹360 crore internal funding round , putting in ₹300 crore himself alongside ₹45 crore from Temasek and ₹16 crore from IFC and 360 One, with the company expecting roughly ₹900 crore more in cash once the Unacademy deal closes to take its total capital pool to about ₹1,260 crore. Test-prep CEO Sumit Jain, an Unacademy co-founder, will step down on June 30 and stay on as advisor through the integration of the $218 million all-stock deal signed in late April.

• Allen Career Institute, the Kota-based JEE and NEET prep firm backed by James Murdoch and Uday Shankar’s Bodhi Tree, has expanded from 43 cities in FY22 to 78 cities in 21 states ahead of an IPO , deepening into Agra, Gorakhpur, Bhilai, Kolhapur and Vijayawada. The firm claims one in four IIT and AIIMS admits has been trained at Allen over the last two cycles, and is the only Indian coaching brand putting its results through an EY audit. The push follows PhysicsWallah’s ₹3,840 crore listing last year, the first major Indian edtech IPO, in a sector still digesting Byju’s collapse.

Partnerships & Strategic Initiatives

• Punjab cleared PhysicsWallah’s three-acre Patiala campus for the state’s first private digital university , with courses to begin in July. Under Punjab’s January 2026 digital open universities policy, the physical campus is only an administrative headquarters since classes run online, players must hold a ₹20 crore corpus, and 15% of seats are reserved for state-domiciled learners. The licence extends a year in which PW also pulled in ₹205 crore in a 20-day Vishwas Diwas launch window , Alakh Pandey’s lower-margin Tier-II and III bet.

• India and Norway signed five research and education MoUs in Oslo on May 18 , with CSIR Director General N. Kalaiselvi leading the Indian side during PM Modi’s visit. The deals cover climate change, clean energy, ocean science and healthcare, with student and faculty exchanges between CSIR and Norway’s Research Council. The CSIR push sits alongside six foreign universities pooling ₹1,000 crore in Indian campus scholarships as both sides hedge against Western visa volatility.

• IIT Mandi, Imarticus Learning and NSDC have launched a 24-credit AI minor degree for undergraduates at colleges across India, structured as a seven-semester pathway through machine learning, deep learning, generative AI, NLP and computer vision. Seven private universities including Lingaya’s Vidyapeeth, Lamrin Tech and Alard have signed up first, with NSDC handling outreach. Imarticus itself is preparing a ₹1,000 crore IPO in FY27 , so the academic partnership doubles as a distribution and brand play.

• Google announced the Google AI Educator Series with Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Assam, Ladakh and the Punjab board , a mobile-first NEP-aligned programme that will roll out in Hindi, Assamese, Marathi, Telugu, Odia and Punjabi. A separate three-year UNICEF tie-up across India, Brazil, Pakistan and Kenya will lean on Gemini, ReadAlong and NotebookLM for literacy and numeracy. The deal puts Google on the same teacher-training turf as Microsoft, whose Elevate for Educators is targeting two million Indian teachers across 200,000-plus schools .

Policy & Government

• NTA chief Abhishek Singh told the Parliamentary Standing Committee ’no paper leak happened, only certain questions came out’ , delivering the denial to the same Digvijaya Singh-led panel that has just opened a review of whether the post-2024-leak Radhakrishnan reforms for NTA had actually been implemented . Pradhan summoned Meta, Google and Telegram to demand a proactive takedown of fake-leak channels feeding panic ahead of June 21 , the same surface where NDTV traced how the original leak ring distributed handwritten question sets to aspirants through private Telegram groups . The Centre has also posted two new joint secretaries and two new joint directors to NTA and directed district magistrates and SPs to coordinate security for the June 21 retest. Supreme Court petitions filed by FAIMA, the United Doctors Front and an RJD MP are pushing for NTA’s dissolution, digital locking of question papers and a court-monitored CBT roadmap , while Congress took the Education Minister’s resignation demand to Jaipur streets and was met by water cannons.

• Andhra HRD Minister Nara Lokesh unveiled an ‘Andhra Model of Education’ aimed at 100% school enrolment , citing nearly one lakh identified dropouts, sending teachers abroad for training, and introducing clicker technology and Chromebooks for Class IX students. A separate state plan would fold every higher-ed admission into a single digital portal , extending the restructuring that started with Andhra’s Commissionerate of Higher Education and APAAR rollout in March.

• Bihar’s Samrat Choudhary government will hire 100,000 teachers over the next five years , with 20,000 yearly notifications going out every July and a transfer policy keeping female teachers in panchayats adjacent to their home panchayat where possible. Karnataka has asked finance for clearance on 15,000 teacher hires and started tendering for 800 Karnataka Public Schools, each enrolling 1,200 students from LKG to PUC, with the first launching in Shivamogga on June 1. Bihar’s school uniforms will now be supplied through Jeevika self-help groups, tying the recruitment drive to the women’s livelihood architecture the state already runs.

• Telangana is moving on two fronts. The state plans external assessments for Classes I to IX from 2026-27 , with teachers from other schools conducting and grading, after Parakh data showed 75% of Class IX students could not apply the percentage concept and 69% could not identify number sets. The Cabinet is also set to take up a Private Unaided School Fee Regulatory Bill capping fee hikes at 8% every two years with penalties of up to ₹10 lakh, after parents reported 30% hikes this year.

• Madhya Pradesh CM Mohan Yadav ordered an AI-skills action plan for Classes 8 to 12 , alongside guest-teacher recruitment by July 1 and a ‘Shikshak Vandan’ programme running from July 1 to Guru Purnima. He also wants every Class 12 pass-out tracked into higher education, employment, agriculture or skill training to build a state youth database.

• West Bengal’s newly formed government, led by CM Suvendu Adhikari, launched the Vivekananda Merit Scholarship and committed the state to the National Education Policy , targeting at least one PM Shri school in every block and ending religious allowances in favour of merit-based grants regardless of caste or religion. The Cabinet also warned private schools against arbitrary fee collection and called for depoliticising universities.

• Tamil Nadu’s new CM Joseph Vijay put school education on the top of his governance review agenda , holding his first post-portfolio meetings with school education minister Rajmohan and senior officials at the Secretariat in Chennai. The review covered preparations for school reopening after the summer vacation and the imminent Class 10 results, with detailed departmental consultations following from the minister. The TVK administration, fresh off a decisive assembly mandate, is using the early review meetings to put its governance structure in place and signal its priorities.

• UP is doubling down on the ‘Yogi Model’ brand. Operation Kayakalp has now covered 1.32 lakh council schools with infrastructure saturation up from 36% in 2017-18 to 96.30% , and the state has identified land for 141 of 150 CM Model Composite Schools planned across 75 districts. Separately the higher education ministry is introducing a mandatory dress code for 49 lakh college and university students , arguing it cures ‘inferiority complex’, while the opposition is calling it an attempt to control youth ahead of the 2027 assembly polls.

• Tripura has opened pre-primary sections in 450 government schools this academic year and trained 100 teachers from 94 newly opened schools across West Tripura. Enrolment in government pre-primary schools rose 24-25% over the previous year, with NEP 2020’s foundational-learning push as the stated peg. The directorate is leaning on play-based teaching and low-cost classroom aids built by the trainees themselves.

• The UGC has asked NLUs and law colleges to integrate the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita into their curricula and to develop case studies on India’s shift towards forensic-based investigation. The directive follows recommendations from the November 2025 DG and IG of Police Conference and asks institutions to file compliance updates. It pushes legal education further into the criminal-procedure overhaul that came into effect on July 1, 2024.

• The Supreme Court orally chastised Higher Education Secretary Vineet Joshi for not extending logistical support to the R.M. Sharma-led panel auditing private universities, with Justice Amanullah saying ‘You have misunderstood the court and its position under the Constitution’. Joshi has been asked to file recommendations on regulating universities by July 10. What started as an Amity student’s name-change petition is now a pan-India directive asking states to disclose private-university management, land allotments and board composition.

• The Education Ministry told the joint parliamentary committee examining the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill that it will not alter state universities’ status and only supplements state governments. The bill, introduced in Parliament in December 2025, proposes a 12-member commission to replace the UGC, AICTE and NCTE under the NEP 2020 framework, and has been challenged by Tamil Nadu’s State Platform for Common School System as unconstitutional . IITs at the panel’s latest meeting raised concerns about preserving their statutory autonomy.

• The Education Ministry clarified that the new School Management Committee Guidelines 2026 do not apply to private unaided schools that receive no government aid or grants. SMCs were first mandated under the Right to Education Act 2009 to give parents a formal role in school governance, and Pradhan launched the updated 2026 guidelines on May 6 extending the framework with a single committee covering Balvatika to Class 12 and sharper roles around financial oversight and attendance monitoring. The ministry said private schools are still encouraged to constitute SMCs voluntarily.

• The Nagpur Bench of the Bombay High Court held that an undertrial prisoner cannot be denied his right to education , directing Nagpur Central Prison to escort a 69-year-old LLB student to his Summer 2026 second-semester exam at Dr BRA Law College without charging him for the escort. The Justice Joshi Phalke and Mehta bench cited Article 21 and ordered the college to provide a separate hall with an invigilator.

• The Education Ministry says APAAR, the ‘One Nation-One Student ID’ system, has issued 16.08 crore IDs in two years , now one of the world’s largest student digital identity programmes. The Aadhaar-linked ID is meant to maintain a verified lifelong academic record on DigiLocker. The rollout has been bumpy in places, with Andhra Pradesh’s adoption running into student-union opposition over privatisation fears earlier this year.

• Kanpur police busted a pan-India fake-degree racket led by two arrested operators , recovering 80 forged migration certificates and counterfeit university seals from Lingaya’s Vidyapeeth, Mangalayatan, JS, Glocal, Sikkim Professional and CSJM University, with ₹16 lakh and ₹20 lakh moving through two accounts under scrutiny. Officers also recovered photographs of one accused with 60-plus Bollywood and sports personalities, allegedly used to build credibility through his ‘Global Book of Excellence Award UK London’ event circuit. The same Kanpur unit had cracked a smaller nine-state racket three months earlier, seizing 900 marksheets linked to 14 universities.

Financial Reports & Market Trends

• Cambridge International’s March 2026 series saw 7% more entries in India year on year , with 447 participating schools, AS Level entries up 16%, A Level up 8% and IGCSE up 6%. Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry remain the top subjects at both stages. Cambridge is the only international awarding body running a March cycle aligned with the Indian academic calendar.

• A fresh USCIS memo reiterating that permanent residency adjustment is a discretionary benefit, not an entitlement , is adding to a stack of OPT, STEM and H-1B uncertainties already steering Indian students away from the US. Study-abroad founders at AdmitKard, BorderPlus and Leverage Edu say applications to Germany, Ireland, France and the Netherlands are now growing, even though the memo itself changes no immigration law. The shift dovetails with the foreign-campus push that has Indian operators trying to absorb students who once would have left .

• Campus Fund’s State of Student Entrepreneurship in India report tracked 7,300 student startups in 2025, with deep-tech now accounting for 16.87% of the funnel as edtech’s share fell 36% from 2021 . PhD founders in the funnel rose nearly seven-fold to 237 in 2024-25, and Delhi just overtook Bengaluru in city-level volume. Most of the deep-tech activity, however, still sits in applied AI; quantum, neuromorphic and photonics together account for under 2%.

• The World Bank’s new From Prospective to Prepared Teacher: A Global Study of Initial Teacher Education sets out five principles for strengthening teacher preparation, drawing on case studies from Bahrain, Chile, Finland, India, Kenya and Vietnam, and pitches India’s District Institutes of Education and Training as the country’s primary lever. Officially launching on June 2.

Opinions

• Is the IIT brand still worth mortgaging a middle-class family’s savings if industry insiders are projecting an average package of ₹15 lakh across IITs? India Today’s breakdown of IIT Bombay’s 2024-25 numbers puts typical family spend at ₹18-27 lakh against a current IIT Bombay median package of ₹20 lakh and a placement rate that has slipped from 75% to 70%. Read it for the uncomfortable arithmetic the coaching industry would rather you not run.

• What happens to a French teacher of two decades when CBSE’s three-language framework counts English itself as the foreign language? Business Standard tracks the WhatsApp panic among French, German, Spanish and Japanese teachers as schools either reassign them, drop the subject, or shift them to contractual ₹20,000-25,000 pay packets. A must-read for anyone tracking the second-order effects of language-policy reform on the white-collar middle.

• How did a Kota teacher and his co-founder build a billion-dollar listed edtech by pricing courses at a fraction of what rivals charged and then opening physical campuses while the sector shrank? Forbes India profiles Alakh Pandey and Prateek Boob’s high-volume, lower-margin Tier-II and III playbook . Dive in for the only original Indian edtech model that survived the post-Byju’s reckoning.

• How does a private school survive when 70-85% of its parents pay less than ₹500 a month and its primary teachers earn ₹5,000-8,000? The Wire’s field report on India’s invisible budget-school subset argues these neighbourhood schools, lumped in by regulation with elite-private institutions, are quietly serving a large share of the 95.9 million children currently in private schools. A must-read for understanding why the public-versus-private debate misses the actual market most Indian families use.

Others

• Indian teacher and activist Rouble Nagi, winner of the GEMS Education Global Teacher Prize 2026 , met King Charles III at Buckingham Palace this week at the 50th anniversary garden party of the King’s Trust. Nagi has built over 800 learning centres in 100-plus marginalised communities across India, anchored on her ‘Living Walls of Learning’ concept that turns abandoned walls into open-air murals teaching literacy, numeracy, science and hygiene. The programme has trained more than 600 educators and reportedly cut dropout rates at its centres by over 50%.

Job Openings

• PhysicsWallah is the listed edtech now opening Punjab’s first digital university. They’re hiring Product Managers across six tracks including Engagement & Core Experience, Subscription, B2C, ERP, Internal AI Automations and Conversational AI Products, at PM1 through SPM2 levels. Director of Product Ajay Mittal will personally review every application that meets each role’s qualifying bar, so applicants are asked to read the threshold carefully before applying.

• Vedantu is the Bengaluru-based online tutoring platform that recently said it plans to go public in 2027. They’re hiring across the board including Chief of Staff to COO, Chief of Staff to Co-Founder (CX), Growth Manager, YouTube Growth Manager, Executive Assistants, Sales Team Leader (USA), Sales Executives, Content Strategist and Social Media Content Creator. Full list and application links are in CSO Saurabh Bharuka’s pinned post.

• Emeritus is the global executive education provider with India among its largest markets. They’re hiring three Team Leads for the India Business sales team , 100% remote, for candidates with at least 2 years managing teams of 8-10 and quarterly revenue of ₹8-10 crore. Prior edtech sales and selling to working professionals is a prerequisite; immediate joiners or candidates who can join before June 20 will be preferred.

• LEAD Group runs an integrated school operating system for affordable private schools across India. They’re hiring Academic Coaches under the PROPEL programme in Raipur and Bhopal at ₹7 LPA plus travel allowances, for candidates with at least 3 years as a Teacher Trainer, Academic Coordinator or Teacher and a willingness to travel across the region. Send a resume to [email protected] ; immediate joiners preferred.

• Avanti Fellows works on government school teacher development and student programmes at scale across India. They’re hiring a Head of Learning and Development with 10-15 years of experience across teacher training, instructional design, coaching and capability building. The location is flexible across India with 25-30% travel.

• Central Square Foundation is the nonprofit working with state and district governments on foundational literacy and numeracy. They’re hiring across SPMU and DPMU teams in Telangana and Odisha for candidates with 0-7+ years of relevant work. Applications are open at tinyurl.com/CareersAtCSF.

• Samagra | Transforming Governance is the consulting firm that has helped run several state-government missions including FLN, Mission Karmayogi and the Punjab Skill Mission. They’re hiring Associates, Senior Associates, Consultants and Emerging Leaders with at least 12 months of full-time experience for the first three levels and 34 months for the Emerging Leader role. Applications close on June 7; queries to [email protected] .

• Dost Education runs phone and WhatsApp-based early childhood learning programmes through frontline workers in Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand. They’re hiring a Field Coordinator, Programme Associate (Operations) and Senior Associate (Operations) for candidates passionate about working with parents, caregivers and Anganwadi Workers. Email [email protected] with the role title in the subject line.

• The Circle India is a Mumbai-based education nonprofit. They’re hiring a Senior Manager, Technology in Mumbai for someone excited about using technology to drive impact in education, building systems and solving problems in mission-driven spaces. Send a CV to [email protected] and [email protected] .

• CBM India is the disability and inclusion organisation working on equitable opportunities across the country. They’re hiring an E-Learning and Relationship Officer and a Project Coordinator in Bengaluru, with a master’s plus 5-7 years for the first role and 3-5 years for the second. Apply at [email protected] with the full JD linked from CBM India’s LinkedIn.

• U&I Trust runs volunteer-led learning centres across Indian cities for underserved children. They’re hiring an Associate Manager - Teach Program in Hyderabad for someone with 0-3 years who can manage 2-3 learning centres, run national events, and build leadership capacity among volunteers.

• Bhanzu, the math-and-mental-arithmetic edtech founded by mental calculation world record holder Neelakantha Bhanu Prakash, is hiring a Senior Program Manager in Bangalore (in-office). The brief is for someone who has built AI-automation projects and led teams, and treats systems thinking as the default rather than manual processes.

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