Bharat Edscape Weekly - Issue #13

India’s chief economic adviser told young Indians this week that the era of software, computer science and MBA degrees is over, just as a survey found 95% of employers think classroom skilling fails to produce job-ready talent. Yet the credential machine kept humming: the Centre cleared three more foreign universities to open Indian campuses, India and France signed a pact targeting 30,000 Indian students in France by 2030, and Bihar lined up 200 new degree colleges. The same week, Byju Raveendran dodged a Singapore jail cell, a reminder that the last edtech boom is still being cleaned up.

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Funding & Acquisitions

• Suniel Shetty-backed Fusion Klassroom secured in-principle approval from the BSE for an SME-platform IPO , three months after it filed its draft papers in February . The Mumbai hybrid-coaching firm runs an OTT app alongside offline partner centres, and more than doubled FY25 revenue to ₹10.1 crore while net profit jumped to ₹2.9 crore.

• Byju Raveendran got a reprieve. The Singapore High Court stayed the committal order behind the six-month jail term it handed him for contempt , so no imprisonment takes effect while his appeal runs. The original sentence, over alleged non-compliance with asset-disclosure orders , would have required him to surrender on June 15. His advisers insist the matter is a contract dispute, not a finding of fraud.

• Gurugram startup Omli raised $1.5 million in seed funding led by India Quotient, with General Catalyst joining . Founded in 2025, it builds speech AI tuned for children aged three to ten, betting on a gap left by models trained mostly on adult voices. Its app lets kids hold voice conversations with an AI companion called Doro.

• Bengaluru’s Oda Class is quietly trying to defy the edtech slowdown without going offline . The K-12 tutoring startup grew revenue from ₹50.6 crore in FY23 to ₹86.5 crore in FY25 while cutting losses to ₹35.4 crore, and is now hunting a round of “easily around ten million dollars” to push its dual-teacher model and a new K-12 AI tutor.

• Online higher-education firm UNIVO named Nitin Golani its new chief executive . Golani arrives with two decades across Aakash, OYO, Ola Electric and Accenture, and inherits a platform that says it serves over 200,000 learners across 130-plus countries through university degree partnerships.

• UK-based Acumen acquired EduCorePro, an AI admissions-technology firm , folding its document-handling and applicant-engagement tools into Acumen’s international student-recruitment business. Founder Bhushan Samant joins as a technology chief. The pitch is AI-led triage and fraud detection as universities chase application quality without growing headcount.

Partnerships & Strategic Initiatives

• The Centre cleared three more foreign universities to open Indian campuses : the University of Bristol and University of York in Mumbai, and UNSW Sydney in Bengaluru. The Letters of Approval, issued under NEP 2020 and the UGC’s 2023 foreign-campus rules , follow Liverpool’s Bengaluru nod a week earlier , and cover programmes from AI and cybersecurity to finance and education technology.

• India and France adopted an Innovation Roadmap 2030 at the Modi-Macron talks in Nice , spanning AI, startups, space and education. France reaffirmed a target of welcoming 30,000 Indian students by 2030, the two sides agreed to widen their mutual qualification-recognition framework, and a Franco-Indian campus for aeronautics training is planned in Kanpur.

• IIT Ropar signed an MoU with ed-tech nonprofit Rocket Learning to build AI-enabled training for Anganwadi workers and frontline caregivers. Rocket Learning already works with government systems across 16 states and has reached six million children under the age of six, and wants to touch 50 million by 2030.

• OpenAI deepened its India education push , extending beyond the 100,000-plus ChatGPT Edu licences it began handing IITs, IIMs and other institutions in February to course tie-ups with PhysicsWallah, upGrad and HCL GUVI. India now has more than 100 million weekly ChatGPT users, and education queries run at twice the global median. TCS became the first organisation outside the US to join OpenAI’s certification programme.

• Reliance Digital partnered with Sri Chaitanya-backed Infinity Learn to bundle a ₹5,000 learning voucher with laptop purchases across its 690-plus stores, under a ‘Boot Up India’ campaign with Intel. Infinity Learn runs Grades 3 to 12 and JEE/NEET prep, the latest sign of edtech reaching for distribution through retail rather than ad spend.

• Healthcare-skilling platform Virohan launched a ₹2 crore scholarship to draw more women into allied-health education . Female students get ₹50,000 to ₹2 lakh against fees, scaled to their Class 12 marks, across programmes at 20-plus partner institutions. The timing tracks a widening gap between demand for trained healthcare workers and supply, at home and in ageing economies like Germany and Japan.

Policy & Government

National

• The Centre extended Samagra Shiksha by six months past its March 2026 expiry to keep funds flowing to states while it finalises an NEP-aligned revamp. The umbrella school-education scheme, allocated ₹421 billion for FY27, pays for everything from teacher salaries to smart classrooms, so the stopgap matters for states drawing up this year’s work plans.

• Two exam bodies moved to shore up credibility. The NTA said it is exploring AI to set question papers , building larger question banks under a “zero-trust” model where experts contribute questions without knowing which exam they feed, to cut the human leak points behind recent fiascos. Separately, IIT Roorkee rejected viral social-media claims of rigged JEE Advanced 2026 ranks , calling the circulated data fake and finding no evidence of malpractice.

• The Delhi-built Samarth e-governance portal, which holds 1.8 crore student records across 13,000 institutions nationwide, is buckling for students at TISS, BHU, Patna University and the University of Hyderabad. They report “data not found” errors, altered dates of birth, crashed admission forms and late fees from missed deadlines, a reminder that India’s exam-tech troubles run well past CBSE.

Bihar

• Bihar is set to open more than 200 new degree colleges from July , one in each of the 213 blocks that had none, under its Saat Nischay-3 programme. The state has sanctioned over 9,000 teaching and non-teaching posts, earmarked ₹320 crore to build 55 colleges into centres of excellence by 2030, and is planning a ₹547 crore Education City near Patna.

Haryana

• Haryana’s Super 100 keeps sending government-school children to the IITs : 100 of its students cleared JEE Advanced this year, and more than 300 have reached IITs and government medical colleges over eight years. The free two-year residential programme, run with the Vikalp Foundation, saves families roughly ₹6 lakh in coaching costs and echoes the welfare-gurukul results Telangana posted last week .

Jharkhand

• Jharkhand’s JEPC signed on for an Education Policy Lab with a Bengaluru nonprofit, an institutional platform for evidence-based reform across pedagogy, curriculum, assessment and teacher development, on an initial 18-month roadmap. The lab is meant to focus especially on children from tribal, rural and migrant communities.

Kerala

• Kerala’s private-universities law is still stuck waiting on presidential assent , Higher Education Minister Roji M John said. The bill, passed in March 2025, reserves 40% of seats for Kerala students and demands a ₹25 crore corpus per institution, part of the UDF government’s bid to stop students leaving the state . Notably, it bars foreign universities from setting up there.

Telangana

• The June 11 NITI Aayog Governing Council, chaired by the Prime Minister, gave chief ministers a stage. Telangana’s Revanth Reddy pitched an education-led development plan built on his state’s 2024 caste survey , touting English-medium “Young India Schools” in every constituency and asking the Centre for an IIM in Hyderabad. He kept the education portfolio himself, he said, out of conviction.

• Telangana’s Save Education Committee demanded the government drop plans to shut about 23,000 schools in tribal and rural hamlets , calling it anti-Adivasi and anti-rural. It is the pushback to Revanth Reddy’s plan to fold 27,000 government schools into 4,000 cluster schools , with critics arguing bus pickups are unrealistic in remote areas.

Tripura

• Tripura launched its first online school-monitoring system to track foundational learning in real time, with block and cluster resource persons inspecting primary schools every fortnight and teacher recognition tied to outcomes. It is part of the state’s NIPUN foundational-literacy push.

Uttar Pradesh

• UP Governor Anandiben Patel directed all state universities and colleges to set up “anti-conversion cells” , citing reports of students allegedly converted through inducement or pressure. The letter asks institutions to alert police and invoke the state’s 2021 anti-conversion law, which the Allahabad High Court itself recently flagged for a “disturbing trend” of false cases.

West Bengal

• Bengal’s new higher education minister Jagannath Chattopadhyay said the state will now implement NEP 2020 “in letter and spirit” , a sharp reversal after the Mamata Banerjee government had resisted the policy and refused CUET for state universities. The move opens the door to the Indian Knowledge System curriculum and a Delhi-style common entrance test.

Financial Reports & Market Trends

• A TeamLease EdTech Foundation report found 95% of employers say classroom training alone does not create job-ready talent , yet 62% keep funding short courses because they are easy to deploy and report. Surveying 860 CSR and HR leaders, it found over 75% now want to shift money toward longer, work-linked pathways. The shift the report describes is from counting people trained to tracking who stays employed.

• Chief Economic Adviser V Anantha Nageswaran told young Indians to pick up trade skills over software or MBA degrees , arguing AI is closing the white-collar advantage India built. He pointed to welding, plumbing, caregiving and counselling as work AI cannot easily replace, and said India must learn from Germany and Japan to respect manual trades.

• The government said its digital education push has reached over 1.49 lakh schools , with 1.76 lakh smart classrooms sanctioned and SWAYAM logging 6.1 crore enrolments. The One Nation One Subscription scheme now spans 7,414 institutions, and Atal Tinkering Labs have crossed 10,000. The numbers are reach, not yet learning outcomes.

Opinions

• Is parental consent really enough to protect a child’s learning data? An Observer Research Foundation brief argues that India’s DPDP Act leaves a gap edtech-specific rules need to fill , as platforms hoover up vast troves of minors’ data with only generic compliance to govern it. Read it for the multilayer framework it proposes before the next breach forces the question.

• In the AI-skills race, is India quietly making the smarter bet? One analysis contrasts America’s rush to build 74 standalone AI degrees with India’s choice to embed AI across every discipline instead. With over 60% of Indian institutions now allowing AI tools, the piece asks whether employers will end up valuing the degree or the skill. A sharp read for anyone betting on where AI talent gets built.

Job Openings

• Sushila Devi Bansal College, part of Indore’s Bansal Group of Institutes, is hiring a Registrar to lead academic administration and institutional governance on its Indore campus. They want an experienced higher-education administrator. Apply with a CV to [email protected] or call +91 9770347016.

• Orion Educational Society is a nonprofit building a new school and skilling vertical, SPROUT, across Tier 2 and Tier 3 India. They’re hiring a founding Chief Impact Officer, Education to own strategy, fundraising and multi-state delivery, for someone with 10 to 18 years in education, skilling or CSR and a grasp of NEP 2020, NCVET and Samagra Shiksha. Send a CV and a two-line note on fit to [email protected] .

• Maker Bhavan Foundation, part of The Convergence Foundation, works to transform Indian engineering education. They’re hiring a Head of Partnerships Ecosystem in Mumbai, Delhi or Bengaluru to move industry tie-ups from one-off corporate deals to alliances with associations, clusters and nonprofits, for someone with 10-plus years in industry bodies, corporate strategy or large nonprofit operations. Apply through the listing or write to [email protected] .

• The Language SKOOL is a profitable language-learning edtech with a 600-plus remote workforce. They’re hiring a Chief Executive Officer , remote and pan-India, at ₹36 to 48 LPA to run sales, marketing, operations, technology, HR and finance. They want 25-plus years of leadership, including 8 to 10 as CEO or business head with full P&L ownership. Apply to [email protected] .

• Narayana Group, the national K-12 and test-prep chain, is hiring a School Principal in Bengaluru, mandatorily with CBSE school experience, to lead academics, student development and administration. Send a CV to [email protected] .

• Mantra4Change, a nonprofit that works with governments on systemic school transformation, is hiring a Senior Manager, Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning to anchor its measurement and learning work. Apply through its careers portal.

• A leading edtech (hiring through recruiter Rishabh Arora) is looking for a P&L Head to “operate like a category CEO,” owning revenue, growth, product and team end-to-end, at around ₹1 crore a year. The company is unnamed in the post. Apply through the link.

• A CBSE school in Roorkee (hiring via SNS Consultancy) is looking for a Principal at ₹18 to 24 LPA plus family accommodation, wanting a master’s with B.Ed, 10-plus years of teaching and 5-plus in leadership. Apply at [email protected] or call +91 9289373384.

• An international school in Ahmedabad (hiring via EducoHire) wants a Head of Marketing, Communication and Admission with 12-plus years in IB schools to own branding, admissions and outreach, with immediate joining. Send a CV to [email protected] .

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