SMall talk epsilon away from correct
← All posts
educationedscape weeklyIndia

Bharat Edscape Weekly - Issue #23

Aug 25, 2026 12 min read
Sandeep Mallareddy Sandeep Mallareddy

Niti Aayog put a number on the drift this week: 8.7 crore Indians aged 15 to 29 were in neither education, employment nor training as of 2021, and only 8.25% of graduates hold a job that matches their qualification. Meanwhile the Supreme Court told the Centre to stop hopping from one exam reform committee to the next, the Jharkhand High Court froze two of the exam cancellations the state ordered after last month’s agitation, and school children in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh took to the streets over broken buildings and filthy roads. The court’s inquiry into the police crackdown on student protesters was told to report at the earliest, with the case listed again on September 10.

I’d love to hear what you think. Push back, agree, or share what I missed. Drop me a note at [email protected] . And if this is worth a spot in your inbox every week, go ahead and subscribe

Funding & Acquisitions

  • NoPaperForms, the parent of admissions software Meritto, reported profit after tax of ₹11.9 crore in FY26, up 6.3 times, on revenue of ₹115.7 crore . A ₹3.7 crore net tax credit helped the bottom line. The company cleared SEBI in March and is yet to file its updated offer document, and is reported to be targeting ₹500 crore to ₹600 crore at around a ₹2,000 crore valuation.

  • Academic Capital Partners, co-led by Global Schools Group founder Atul Temurnikar and former PwC partner Vishal Thapliyal, is seeking up to $300 million for a debut fund to buy K-12 school assets, Bloomberg reported. Fundraising was due to begin within about two weeks, with a first close targeted for the first quarter of 2027, and the fund is looking at schools with EBITDA of $1 million to $5 million across Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, India, Thailand, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Temurnikar’s school group signed a ₹1,051 crore agreement with Uttar Pradesh for 10 K-12 schools earlier this year.

Partnerships & Strategic Initiatives

  • The University of London is working towards a campus in Hyderabad , Telangana said after a roundtable at Senate House with teams from LSE and SOAS. Chief Minister Revanth Reddy’s delegation also met academics from Cambridge Judge Business School and agreed to build a framework covering teaching programmes, research and startup incubation in Hyderabad.

  • France is running a four-city tour with more than 50 institutions in October, part of a target of hosting 30,000 Indian students by 2030 . Indian enrolment in French higher education reached 9,100 in 2024-25, moving India from the 13th to the 11th largest source country. The participating institutions are mostly engineering schools, business schools and public universities. France’s push into India goes back at least to March, when KEDGE Business School opened a Mumbai campus with Vijaybhoomi University.

Policy & Government

National

Andhra Pradesh

  • Education Minister Nara Lokesh pushed four bills through the assembly, all passed unanimously. One cuts the land a private university needs from 50 acres to 10 in the main urban corridors and 15 acres elsewhere, removes the minimum investment requirement, cuts the endowment fee to ₹5 crore and puts approvals on a 60-day online track. It also drops the requirement to partner a globally top-100 foreign university for joint degrees.

  • A separate bill clears the way for 1,523 faculty appointments in state universities, where Lokesh said nearly 77% of teaching posts are vacant and the last recruitment was in 2012 . It sets out rules for departmental reservation, seniority, promotions and supernumerary posts, which Lokesh said is meant to ensure the reservation and recruitment withstand legal scrutiny.

Delhi

Haryana

  • A new standing order dated August 12 has pulled school education decisions up to the minister and the chief minister , superseding earlier delegation rules. Opening and closing schools, taking over privately managed institutions, board affiliations, admission portals and fee increases in government and private schools now sit with School Education Minister Mahipal Dhanda. Senior appointments, transfers of Group A and B officers and major policy go to the chief minister.

  • A Gurgaon district court ordered a private school to admit a four-year-old within 15 days after it refused him a seat he had won in Haryana’s own computerised lottery , on the grounds that his home was more than 3 km away. The court called the state portal’s failure to filter school choices by address a procedural lapse the parent could not be blamed for. The school told the court that of 45 children allotted seats under the quota, one had been admitted.

Jharkhand

  • The Jharkhand High Court stayed the state’s order cancelling the 11th and 13th JPSC examinations and the appointments that followed , giving relief to newly appointed officers who had challenged it. The state had scrapped 44 recruitment exams run by the JPSC and JSSC after a 25-day agitation by job aspirants over irregularities, a list covering deputy collectors, civil judges, assistant professors and forest range officers. The petitioners argued they were never heard, and that anyone found culpable should be dealt with individually rather than everyone losing a job they say they won fairly.

Karnataka

Maharashtra

  • Cockroach Janta Party convenor Abhijeet Dipke visited a Zilla Parishad school in Latur’s Ausa tehsil on August 20 and demanded School Education Minister Dada Bhuse’s resignation , saying children were studying without proper classrooms, benches, toilets or safe access roads. He said the ministers’ dogs get better facilities than these students. He wants ministers and MLAs to enrol their own children in government schools.

  • Two days later, Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde spent four hours reviewing the school education department and told it to work in mission mode on a time-bound plan to modernise government schools . The review covered teacher training and incentives, mid-day meals, health check-ups and student mental health. He also asked officials to communicate the department’s initiatives better to parents and alumni.

Meghalaya

  • The state Cabinet cleared six education bills, including two to set up new private universities , one of them Presbyterian University Meghalaya. Two others make the Governor the Visitor instead of a sponsor appointee and add state representatives to the governing boards of MIT University of Meghalaya and Mahatma Gandhi University. A third restricts Martin Luther Christian University’s operations to Meghalaya and removes its distance education and college affiliation powers to match UGC rules.

Uttar Pradesh

  • Students at a school in Bhattpurwa Samuhi village sat outside their classrooms and refused to go in until an official came and promised them a new school building, which has been pending for years. The principal repeatedly urged them to return to class and they refused. It is the fourth such protest reported in the state, after around 300 children marched 6 km to the Hamirpur collectorate over a road, 250 girls in Lucknow protested teacher shortages, and more than 200 students blocked the Mohan-Bangarmau route in Unnao.

Financial Reports & Market Trends

  • An estimated 8.7 crore Indians aged 15 to 29 were in neither education, employment nor training in 2021, Niti Aayog said, drawing on the 78th round of the National Sample Survey. Only 8.25% of graduates work in roles that match their qualification. The report says this group cannot afford paid skilling because they have no income and have already spent money on their education, and it asks for subsidised training and learn-while-earning options.

  • PhysicsWallah will launch a one-on-one AI tutor next quarter , already in beta, which nudges students towards concepts and asks questions rather than waiting for prompts. The company says testing with 300 students showed a hallucination rate under 1%, which it credits to training on its own lecture archive, and that voice-to-voice tutoring currently costs it about $0.20 an hour. Online NEET collections fell 28% in the June quarter, and management said the delayed exam cycle cost it 1 lakh to 1.5 lakh online enrolments.

  • Collecting phones in a box at the start of a lecture raised grades slightly across 16,955 students at 10 higher education institutions in Odisha , a trial considerably larger than most classroom phone experiments. The average effect was 0.086 standard deviations, but students with weaker prior grades gained roughly twice that. Observers also recorded fewer off-topic conversations and teachers spending more time on teaching material, though the paper is still a working paper and not peer reviewed.

  • A US trial of an AI maths tutor across 6,997 middle school students changed what happened after mistakes . Among students in the trial’s mastery track who got a question wrong, the tutor raised the chance the next attempt was correct by 8.5 percentage points, but added 2.88 minutes to reaching that correct answer, so students got through less material in the same class. A week later, within that same group, 40.2% of AI students answered a practised question correctly against 37.0% on the platform alone, which the authors call suggestive rather than definitive.

Opinions

  • Is the problem that young Indians lack degrees, or that the degrees do not do anything? Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, asked about the Jantar Mantar protests, argues the fix lies in what sits between a qualification and a job , and offers a sharp reading of why the protest never settled into one demand. Worth reading for how the government’s most powerful economic voice frames the education to employment gap, and for what she says the private sector will and will not do about it.

Note: Article URLs are occasionally modified by news agencies and may result in 404 errors. Searching the summary text should help locate the related story.

twitter linked in github bsky substack email