Bharat Edscape Weekly - Issue #26

The Supreme Court says no private university can be run for profit, and it wants five years of audited accounts from every one of them to check. Meanwhile Bihar opened 211 colleges in a single day, Telangana backed off merging its polytechnics after a 35-day protest, and Skillmatics is in talks to raise up to $75 million at more than three times its last valuation.

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Funding & Acquisitions

• Educational games and toys maker Skillmatics is in advanced talks to raise ₹600-700 crore ($60-75 million) from investors including Premji Invest, ChrysCapital and A91 Partners, at a valuation of around $400-420 million, people aware of the talks told Moneycontrol. Most of it is secondary, with Peak XV alone expected to sell about ₹400 crore of shares. Skillmatics last raised $16 million in 2022 at a $128 million valuation, and has since grown sales from about ₹90-100 crore to roughly ₹660 crore in FY26, with the US bringing in about 60% of revenue.

• LEAD Group expects to turn profitable in FY27 or early FY28 and is eyeing an IPO in FY28-FY29 , co-founder and CEO Sumeet Mehta told Financial Express, though he said the listing timeline isn’t a strict one. The plan rests on doubling revenue growth to about 20%. Its AI spoken English tutor, Ms Curie’s Fluento, is used by 20,000 students in 65 schools and is set to reach 500 schools next year.

Partnerships & Strategic Initiatives

• ShikshaNext, the three-year ₹170 crore initiative launched in February on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit , has picked its first 11 EdTech and AI solutions for children aged 4 to 10 . Five with independent evidence behind them, including Rocket Learning, Chimple and Youth Impact, will be taken into government systems with a target of more than 8 million students. Six earlier-stage tools, such as Pratham’s PadhAI and Eedi’s WhatsApp maths tutor, join an accelerator to build their evidence first. The Dell, Reliance and Gates foundations anchor the effort, Central Square Foundation manages it, and Anthropic is a supporting partner.

Policy & Government

National

• No private university can be run as a profit-making institution, the Supreme Court said in a September 17 order telling states to get five years of audited accounts from private universities , and the Centre, states and union territories to collect details from universities and colleges on fees, use of surplus funds, payments to people not connected with running the institution, and how staff are hired and paid. Chief secretaries must personally affirm the affidavits within six weeks, and the case returns on November 19. It began as an Amity University student’s petition over a name change in its records , which the court has since widened into a national look at how private universities are run.

• The Supreme Court has asked CBSE to consider pushing its three-language rule for Class 6 to the 2027 session , while letting current Class 6 students take it up now if they want to. CBSE said it would come back with a fresh note, and the bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant said its suggestions were without prejudice to the case itself. In July the same court had refused to stay the policy .

• The Supreme Court issued notice to school education secretary T K Anil Kumar on a contempt plea by advocate Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay, who says the secretary took no action on his representation seeking registration and monitoring of every institution teaching children under 14, secular or religious. The court had told him on May 11 to take the plea to the Union government, and the secretary now has four weeks to reply.

• Primary teachers hired with a B.Ed instead of a D.El.Ed between June 28, 2018 and August 11, 2023 now have a six-month bridge course to get certified , launched by the Education Ministry and run through the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS). It follows a 2024 Supreme Court judgment that let the National Council for Teacher Education design such a course, and includes at least 20 days of school-based practice.

• CBSE held a 45-minute talkathon on drug abuse prevention with an AIIMS psychiatrist, a Narcotics Control Bureau additional director, a school principal and two Class 12 students, answering questions students had sent in on social media about mental health, peer pressure and de-addiction. The NCB pointed students to its confidential helpline, 1933.

Assam

• Samagra Shiksha Assam signed six AI partnerships on September 4 , with Google AI, IIT Madras-Bodhan AI, Wadhwani AI, Educate Girls, EkStep-AXL and Canva Education, including a plan to train about one lakh teachers of Classes 6 to 12 by May 2027. The hardware is the harder part. Of the state’s 55,283 schools, 36,848 have functional computers for teaching and just 11,513 have working smart classrooms, according to UDISE+ 2024-25.

• Students who fail their exams may have to pay 50% of the admission fee next year instead of getting free admission, Education Minister Ranoj Pegu said, and those below 70% attendance would lose the benefit too. He said free admission has pushed up enrolment, but some students who take it don’t attend class regularly.

Bihar

• Bihar opened 211 degree colleges in a single day , all in block towns that had no degree college of their own, taking its count of state-recognised degree colleges past 1,000 from around 800. Chief Minister Samrat Choudhary told the newly appointed assistant professors that selected faculty would be sent for training at universities such as Oxford. The government will pick 100 teachers in the first lot, and Higher Education Minister Sanjay Singh Tiger said a detailed plan and selection process would follow.

Chhattisgarh

• Chhattisgarh has launched a portal to verify degrees issued by its 21 private universities , tracking each student from admission to degree so it can flag qualifications with no matching admission record or backdated entries. The state will also review courses with low enrolment, poor outcomes or complaints, checking faculty availability and whether classes and exams actually run.

Kerala

• Kerala is building Tharapadham, a single sign-on dashboard that gives schools one login for its main education platforms, with AI features added. For the first time, its Sampoorna school records system will hold data on every school in the state, including CBSE and ICSE schools, Kendriya Vidyalayas and recognised unaided schools.

Madhya Pradesh

• The Madhya Pradesh cabinet approved ₹36,006.22 crore to keep Samagra Shiksha running from 2026-27 to 2030-31 , covering students from pre-primary to Class 12. The scheme pays for teacher training, vocational education and Right to Education Act implementation, and had been extended by the Centre for just six months past its March 2026 expiry ahead of a revamp.

Maharashtra

• A second-year IIT Bombay student died by suicide on the day he was caught uploading an exam paper to ChatGPT , the third suicide on the Powai campus in seven months. The institute says no disciplinary action was started and that his instructor and head of department counselled him. Protesting students allege he was threatened with a one-year suspension and say fear of that action may have contributed to his death, a claim that has not been independently verified. His mother says he was harassed and has filed a complaint, and Mumbai Police have registered an FIR.

Sikkim

• Sikkim has started AI-FunZone in 71 government schools in three blocks of Gangtok district, giving Classes 3 to 5 a daily 60-minute session in English, Nepali and Mathematics with the EkStep Foundation. The system listens to children read and flags specific maths errors, while teachers track progress on a dashboard. Some schools have already reported shortages of computers, headsets and fast internet.

Tamil Nadu

• Tamil Nadu has set a target of education loans for 25,000 students this year , and Higher Education Minister P Viswanathan said a parent’s surety will replace collateral for loans of up to ₹20 lakh, with the scheme still to be implemented. He also asked the Centre to widen its education loan scheme beyond the 133 Tamil Nadu colleges he said it currently covers. At a loan mela in Madurai, 275 students got sanctions worth ₹30.37 crore, almost all of it from public sector banks.

Telangana

• Telangana has backed off its plan to fold government polytechnics into Young India Skills University after a 35-day protest by students and faculty, keeping them under the Technical Education department with no change to diploma courses or exams. Students had feared higher fees at the public-private university and losing lateral entry into engineering degrees.

• Akunuri Murali, former chair of the Telangana Education Commission, has launched a Vidya Bus Yatra across all 10 erstwhile districts , running until September 27, demanding public schools in every mandal, fee regulation in private schools and junior colleges, and 18% of the state budget for education. That is double the 9% Telangana allocated in 2025-26 . “Almost 95% of government schools in Telangana cannot even be called schools,” he said.

Uttar Pradesh

• IIT Kanpur will train 900 secondary school teachers from all 75 districts of Uttar Pradesh in AI, Python, cybersecurity and robotics through an eight-week blended programme with the state and SCERT. It builds on the training of 750 primary teachers, and the same curriculum already sits in SCERT’s Class 6 to 8 textbooks, reaching an estimated 48 lakh students.

Uttarakhand

• Class 10 and 12 students in government schools will get money for tablets directly in their bank accounts , Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami announced. He made the promise at the Mukhyamantri Yuva Vidyarthi Manthan, part of a campaign in which more than 2.67 lakh students sent in essays and ideas.

West Bengal

• West Bengal is weighing a public-private partnership model for some of its 4,133 government schools with zero enrolment , which make up most of the 5,663 such schools nationally in the latest UDISE+ data. Districts will assess each building, with a decision expected within a month, and those unfit for PPP could become training or health centres. Teachers still attached to empty schools could move to nearby schools that need them.

Financial Reports & Market Trends

• More than half of US colleges and universities saw international applications fall for the 2026 academic year , an American Council on Education survey of presidents found, with visa delays, denials and immigration uncertainty the main reasons. Leaders said students from major sending countries, including India and China, have become harder to attract.

• India’s semiconductor manufacturing sector could be short of 2.5-3 lakh professionals by 2027 , according to TeamLease EdTech, and only about 3% of the electronics industry’s 1.4 million-plus workforce has advanced AI and digital skills, according to CIEL HR. TeamLease EdTech chief executive Shantanu Rooj separately warned of a “herd mentality” in higher education , with almost every university launching an AI course, when employers need AI-enabled domain specialists.

• The Centre spent ₹3,509.39 crore on higher education support for SC and OBC students under the SHREYAS scheme between 2014-15 and 2025-26, reaching 1,18,248 students, Social Justice Minister Virendra Kumar said. The overseas scholarship is shrinking, though, with beneficiaries falling from 114 in 2023-24 to 67 in 2025-26.

Opinions

• What if the most important AI work in Indian education has nothing to do with tutors or chatbots? Bhanu Potta argues the real bet is on shared public rails , and puts rupee figures on what that infrastructure now costs that anyone budgeting an AI pilot will want to see. He also draws a clear line between what the state should build and what it should leave alone. Read it for the question he thinks matters more than how many models have been released.

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