Bharat Edscape Weekly - Issue #15

NCERT’s new Class 9 textbook adds a chapter on the 1975 Emergency and quietly drops the words “secular” and “secularism.” Meanwhile a CBSE re-evaluation handed students jumps of 20-plus marks after its first on-screen marking misfired, Maharashtra’s teacher-eligibility test leaked a day before exam day, and the edtech money came back with Toddle chasing $100 million and Byju’s lenders circling a third of Aakash. The capital and the curriculum are both in motion, but the trust in between keeps cracking.

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Funding & Acquisitions

• Byju’s global lenders, led by Glas Trust, are in advanced talks to take a roughly 30% stake in Aakash Educational Services and drop all cases against founder Byju Raveendran over about $1 billion in unpaid loans. The deal values the 300-centre coaching chain near $2 billion, two years after Raveendran conceded the company was worth zero .

• Bengaluru’s Toddle has launched a $50 to $100 million raise , one of India’s biggest edtech rounds since the downturn outside PhysicsWallah. The Peak XV-backed company sells curriculum, assessment and classroom software to K-12 schools, the kind of profitable, subscription-led model investors now prefer.

• Lytmus AI raised a ₹5 crore pre-seed round led by Boundless Ventures to build AI mentors trained on top teachers’ methods for NEET prep. The startup, founded by two IIT Bombay batchmates, says 16,000 students used it in the last 90 days.

• Dubai’s GEMS Education will invest up to $30 million (₹283 crore) in India over three to five years and float a SEBI-registered fund to buy K-12 school assets, a vehicle it may grow to ₹1,000 crore. The Varkey Group plans more than 30 owned schools and 1,000 partner schools, starting with five campuses across Greater Mumbai, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala and Rajasthan.

Partnerships & Strategic Initiatives

• IIT Bombay will set up its first overseas sub-campus, at SUNY Old Westbury on Long Island , with classes expected from 2027 and a focus on engineering, AI and joint research. The two signed a letter of intent in a virtual meeting attended by Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

• IIT-Delhi and France’s Sorbonne University expanded their tie-up with joint postgraduate and PhD programmes in biological science and two-way student mobility, building on their Franco-Indian health campus. President Emmanuel Macron recently flagged the partnership as a flagship of India-France scientific cooperation.

• OpenAI is deepening its India education push , providing more than 100,000 ChatGPT Edu licences to a first cohort that includes IIT Delhi, IIM Ahmedabad and AIIMS, and separately partnering with edtech platforms PhysicsWallah, upGrad and HCL GUVI on AI courses. India is now its largest student market, with over 100 million weekly ChatGPT users.

Policy & Government

National

• More than 20 lakh candidates sat the NEET-UG re-exam on June 21 , pulled together in 38 days against the usual six months after the May paper leak, with the Air Force and central forces roped in to move question papers. Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan and PM Modi praised it as a “whole-of-government” effort , but attendance slid from 96.92% in May to around 75% in Tamil Nadu , as many candidates had taken other admissions or sat out the stress. Students barred for reaching centres after the 1.30pm gate closure drew sympathy, though Pradhan said “discipline is discipline.”

• The secured retest still drew cheats. Bihar police busted a 24-person “Munna Bhai”-style proxy racket in Lakhisarai , including medical students and 14 biometric-company staff, while Indore police arrested a law student selling AI-generated “NEET papers” on Instagram for ₹50 to ₹200. The Centre had blocked Telegram before the exam to choke leak networks.

• NCERT’s revised Class 9 social science textbook, Understanding Society: India and Beyond, adds a first-ever dedicated chapter on the 1975 Emergency while dropping the Constitution’s Preamble and the words “secular” and “secularism” from the main text. It also praises the Election Commission and folds in the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls , the exercise that has deleted nearly 6 crore names across 19 states. Congress and the BJP are trading charges, though Yogendra Yadav notes the Emergency has been in NCERT books since 2007 , and NCERT has separately warned that a pirated version of the same book is circulating online .

• Separately, NCERT rejected bias claims over its Class 6 Kannada textbook , titled Krishna, saying the name follows its river-based naming convention and refers to the river, not the deity, and that its food chapter shows both vegetarian and non-vegetarian items.

• A CBSE Class 12 re-evaluation has produced sharp jumps in marks , with one Physics score climbing from 71 to 90 and a History paper from 74 to 97, after the board’s first year of on-screen marking left students with blurry scripts and mismatched answer keys. Of the 1.6 lakh who applied, about 87% have their revised results, and CBSE will now let students who get a “No-Change” verdict physically inspect their answer books . The student whose answer-sheet mix-up sparked the row gained just two marks overall on re-check.

• CBSE has made Kaushal Vikas, a vocational subject, mandatory for Class IX from this session, with 110 hours a year and marks that will count in the Class X boards from 2027-28. Schools say the mid-year circular leaves them scrambling to hire skill teachers and fit one more subject around NEET and JEE prep.

• In a partial climbdown, CBSE will let students already in Classes 7 to 9 keep their existing two-foreign-language combination through Class 10, applying its two-Indian-languages rule only prospectively from Class 6. The original mandate from Class 9 had drawn parent anxiety and court challenges.

• The government said DIKSHA has become a “One Nation, One Digital Platform” for school education , the NCERT-run platform now carrying QR-linked textbooks, assessments and teacher training, adopted by boards across nearly all states and union territories.

• CISCE rolled out ACTIVE CISCE, a fitness assessment covering 31.2 lakh students across 3,300-plus schools, issuing personal fitness report cards and building a national school-health index. About 26.5 lakh students have been assessed so far.

• Reports of a Union Cabinet reshuffle suggest Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan could be moved , with Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman floated for the education portfolio. There is no official confirmation.

Bihar

• Bihar’s cabinet approved five new private universities across the state to lift its higher-education enrolment ratio, alongside new teacher-transfer rules that shift postings to a portal-based system.

Gujarat

• Gujarat said its AI-based Early Warning System flagged 1.67 lakh students at risk of dropping out last year, while a Child Tracking System helped bring more than 90,000 dropouts back to class. The system reads attendance, marks and student records to predict who is likely to leave.

Karnataka

• Karnataka will introduce STEAM education in government schools , bringing robotics and coding into classrooms through hands-on activities to close the technology gap with private schools.

Maharashtra

• Maharashtra postponed its Teacher Eligibility Test a day before the June 28 exam after a dawn hotel raid in Bhiwandi found pages from the sealed question paper, which a gang had allegedly planned to sell for ₹1.5 crore. Police arrested three and named a Bihar man, Brajendra Gupta, as the suspected mastermind , while the Youth Congress protested outside Education Minister Dadaji Bhuse’s home demanding he resign. The council said it had tightened security after the NEET 2026 mess; 1,028 centres were affected.

• The state cleared a new private skill university for Mumbai and a ₹4,000 crore ITI overhaul backed by the World Bank and ADB, with the Tata Group proposing nearly ₹3,000 crore to support two ITIs per district. The amended skill-university law adds a ₹10 crore bank-guarantee requirement, and the state set a target of placing one lakh young Maharashtrians in overseas jobs.

• Maharashtra also proposed a state portal to guide students applying to overseas universities , with verified information on institutions ranked in the global top 500.

Odisha

• Odisha suspended four officials, including a former director , over errors in Classes 1 to 8 textbooks, after a seven-day inquiry ordered by Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi. The state’s Primary Teachers’ Association had flagged more than 1,600 errors in the new books, and disciplinary proceedings were opened against six more officers.

Punjab

• The Punjab cabinet cleared an ordinance capping annual private-school fee hikes at 5% , with schools wanting more required to face a state panel and a financial audit, and excess fees from the past three years to be refunded.

• The state also launched a skill-training programme for children in observation and special homes , starting with 211 of 420 children across four child-care institutions.

Rajasthan

• Rajasthan rolled out ‘Khushishala’, a mental-health and well-being programme in around 1,500 government schools for Classes 1 to 5, with activity-based lessons on emotions and life skills and a three-day teacher-training module.

Tamil Nadu

• In his first detailed Assembly speech, Chief Minister Joseph Vijay called NEET a “source of inequality” and reaffirmed the state’s two-language policy , keeping Tamil Nadu’s long resistance to the national medical exam and the three-language formula alive under the new TVK government.

• Tamil Nadu introduced Life Skills and Values Education textbooks for Classes 1 to 12 , citing rising drug abuse and indiscipline since the pandemic, and barred other subjects from being taught during the moral-education period for senior classes.

• The state published district-wise private school fees for 2026-27 for the first time , after a State Information Commission order, showing Chennai LKG fees near ₹70,000 a year and a Ranipet school charging ₹95,150 for Class 12, the state’s highest. Many large CBSE chains are missing from the list.

• Higher Education Minister P Viswanathan faces a POCSO complaint over videos from a Madurai school event. He has denied any wrongdoing, saying he was helping girl students who fainted after a marathon and calling the case politically motivated.

Uttar Pradesh

• Fifteen students died in a fire at a coaching centre in Lucknow’s Aliganj , where a library and classes ran on the third floor above a pet shop and a gaming zone, with several students jumping from the building to escape. Days later the state ordered a statewide drive against unregistered coaching centres , directing every district to survey institutes for fire and building-safety compliance under the 2002 coaching law.

• Yogi Adityanath launched the second phase of the School Chalo Abhiyan from July 1 to 15 , targeting full enrolment and the return of out-of-school children.

• The state also opened a free residential IAS and PCS coaching scheme for marginalised students , with 865 seats for SC, ST and OBC candidates from August and over 5,000 already registered.

Financial Reports & Market Trends

• Government schools now teach 49.24% of India’s students, down from 71% in 2005 , the first time they no longer educate the majority, according to a NITI Aayog analysis warning of a trust deficit in public education. It extends the body’s earlier decadal review that flagged 4 in 10 children dropping out before higher secondary .

• A British survey found 76% of UK universities reported fewer Indian students , with overall international postgraduate enrolment down 31% ahead of tougher visa rules. From June the UK ties recruitment to a traffic-light system that bars universities with visa-refusal rates above 4% from growing their intakes.

• IGNOU’s online MBA is drawing rural India, with rural students rising to 35.3% of enrolment in 2025 and more than 95,000 students enrolling between 2021 and 2025.

• CRED founder Kunal Shah was named global CEO of WhatsApp , a 3.3 billion-user app, drawing attention for a path that ran through a philosophy degree and an unfinished MBA. He has also warned that AI will first hit the entry-level and outsourced jobs India relies on , predicting tougher odds for fresh college graduates.

• Seven Indian schools made the top-10 shortlists for the World’s Best School Prizes 2026 , the most from any country in the prize’s history, spanning public and private schools in Pune, Anantnag, Noida, Bengaluru and Lucknow.

Opinions

• What if India’s deepest education problem is not the syllabus or the smart boards, but that there simply are not enough teachers who can teach? A long read tracks a cluster of failures in recruitment, pay, training and retention , from single-teacher schools to private-school salaries of ₹8,000 a month. Read it for why the exam leaks and the empty classroom trace back to the same hollowed-out profession.

• Delhi University, JNU and BHU are still state-owned, but are they still public? This essay argues India’s public universities have drifted toward a private logic , through shrinking grants, self-financing courses and contract faculty, without a single act of privatisation. A sharp read for anyone tracking who actually pays for higher education.

• Why is one of India’s most successful founders telling every young person not to leave the country? Zerodha’s Nithin Kamath offers one blunt piece of advice , built on the fact that nearly half of India is under 25 and one in five young people on earth is Indian. Dive in for the case that the best opportunities are now at home.

• A CBSE school head says the hardest part of running a school in Tamil Nadu was not the students but the officials, alleging that every approval came with a demand for money , with Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu amplifying the post. Read it for a rare on-record account of how school inspections and approvals can work on the ground.

Job Openings

• Masters’ Union is a new-age business school in Gurugram. They’re hiring a Category Head for Capital Markets Education to own the P&L and curriculum of its trading and investing vertical across India and US markets, for someone with deep markets experience.

• upGrad Future Schools Consortium is building a chain of premium K-12 schools. They’re hiring a Head of Marketing and Brand and a Head of Operations for expansion and school development , both based in Hyderabad and needing 8 to 12 years of experience. Apply to [email protected] .

• upGrad School of Technology runs higher-education campuses. They’re hiring a Center Director and Campus Head for Pune and Bangalore, looking for 5-plus years in higher education and university operations to run a campus end-to-end.

• 21K School, an online school operating across more than 70 countries, is hiring a Lead for Training and Programme Delivery in Bengaluru, for an academic leader with 6 to 10 years in facilitator training and instructional design.

• Adda247, an employability-focused edtech backed by Google and WestBridge, is hiring a Business Head with full P&L ownership for someone with 12 to 15 years across B2B and B2C. Apply to [email protected] .

• Shoolini University is a research-focused private university in Himachal Pradesh. Founder Atul Khosla is hiring a President or Dean for its Faculty of Management Sciences , for a senior academician or industry leader who can build a business school. Apply to [email protected] .

• Central Square Foundation, a nonprofit working on foundational learning and edtech, is hiring a Project Lead for Student Learning Assessments in Delhi, needing 8-plus years in large-scale assessment, and a Senior Project Manager for EdTech Evidence and Insights in New Delhi, with 4 to 7 years in programme design or consulting.

• American India Foundation runs large-scale education programmes for underserved communities. They’re hiring a Senior Manager for Monitoring, Evaluation, Research and Learning in Delhi-NCR to lead evidence and evaluation across its education portfolio.

• Teach For India places fellows in under-resourced classrooms. They’re hiring a part-time Senior Consultant for Impact and Operations in Mumbai, a leadership role spanning strategy, finance, technology and administration.

• The Victorian Government’s Department of Jobs, Skills, Industry and Regions runs the Australian state’s trade and education office. They’re hiring a Regional Director for Education, South Asia , based in Bengaluru, full-time and hybrid.

• Lighthouse Communities Foundation, an education and skilling nonprofit, is hiring senior roles including a State Head for Odisha, a Senior Program Operations Manager, and a Centre Head across Pune, Dombivili and Odisha. Apply to [email protected] with the role and location in the subject line.

• Muktangan, a Mumbai nonprofit running schools and a teacher-education programme, is hiring a Lead for English Curriculum and Pedagogy and a Senior Fundraising Executive. Apply with a CV and cover letter to [email protected] .

• Piramal Foundation, which runs the Gandhi Fellowship and social-sector programmes, is hiring two remote senior roles for its alumni ecosystem, a Senior Product Developer for Community Activation and Leadership Transformation and a Senior Product Developer for Digital Platforms, Data and Systems Innovation , both needing 10-plus years; a Gandhi Fellowship or social-sector background is preferred.

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