Bharat Edscape Weekly - Issue #29

Madhya Pradesh’s school enrolment fell by more than 8.6 lakh students in a year, and the state has issued show-cause notices to officials in 10 districts, who say the drop may reflect poor record-keeping rather than students leaving school. The National Medical Commission withdrew the rules that allowed it to fine medical colleges up to ₹1 crore per violation for falling short of minimum standards or misreporting their facilities. Goa proposed compulsory AI lessons from Class 6 starting 2027-28, Madhya Pradesh told coaching centres to register and publish five years of results, and maths-games startup Matiks raised $10 million in a round led by General Catalyst.

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Funding & Acquisitions

• Unacademy co-founders Gaurav Munjal and Roman Saini are raising a ₹700 crore venture fund, Longshot Capital , to back 25-28 seed and pre-Series A startups in AI, manufacturing, space, defence and robotics, according to an Economic Times report. Saini will run it full-time, while Munjal, who still heads Unacademy, will be involved part-time. The fund comes less than two months after upGrad closed its all-stock takeover of Unacademy for just over $200 million, about 94% below its 2021 peak valuation. upGrad’s audited filings show its FY26 revenue from operations rose 7.5% to ₹1,687 crore .

• Matiks, an Indian startup that makes competitive maths and puzzle games, has raised $10 million in a round led by General Catalyst , with Ronnie Screwvala also investing. Co-founder Sudhanshu Bhatia says 2.2 million people played the app in September . The company is testing a subscription for extra features and plans to localise the app for South Korea and Japan.

• New Delhi’s Seasmasters Consulting has raised $5 million to build Supergrad , a business school that teaches engineers and would-be founders to build companies through hands-on work rather than theory. Co-founder Ankur Mukherjee has worked at upGrad, Unacademy, Vedantu and Amity University. The raise lands in a lean market, with edtech equity funding down to $249 million in 2025 from $572 million in 2024.

• Study-abroad platform MSM Unify has acquired medical-education platform KlickEdu and Gujarat coaching provider RJ Vision , taking it into NEET and JEE preparation. KlickEdu says it has helped more than 1 lakh students across 50-plus countries, while MSM Unify connects over 1.9 lakh students with more than 1,500 campuses.

Partnerships & Strategic Initiatives

• Google is opening its AI Educator Series to all teachers as a free, self-paced online course after training more than 80,000 educators since May, and adding Madhya Pradesh and Sikkim alongside Bihar. The programme launched with Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Assam, Ladakh and the Punjab board , and versions in Hindi, Marathi, Telugu, Assamese, Odia and Punjabi are scheduled for later in October .

• The University of Manchester plans a permanent centre in Bengaluru built around its Partner-Enabled Learning model, which puts internships, work placements and employer-led projects into degree programmes. It would join Manchester’s centres in Dubai, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore, though no opening date has been announced . Earlier this year it launched its first India summer school for Class 10 and 11 students , hosted in Gurugram.

• The University of Melbourne and IISER Tirupati have launched a 2+2 dual degree in science , with students spending two years in Tirupati and two in Melbourne and graduating with honours degrees from both. Majors include biotechnology, chemistry, genetics, physics and plant science. Melbourne has also signed an MoU with Tamil Nadu’s TIDCO for an emerging-tech centre near Tiruvallur.

• IIT Ropar has introduced a PhD that needs no thesis , awarding the degree for a product, patent, technology transfer or startup instead. Associate dean Sarang Gumfekar put the bar bluntly: “You sell the product, earn 10 lakh rupees, show it to me. You get PhD.” He says no other IIT offers a similar programme, though BITS Pilani has a comparable route.

Policy & Government

National

• The National Medical Commission (NMC) has withdrawn its 2023 rulebook on medical college standards with immediate effect, and with it fines of up to ₹1 crore per violation, seat cuts, and personal fines of up to ₹5 lakh on doctors and deans who sign false records. That fine was aimed at problems like “ghost faculty” and doctored patient files. Colleges still have to file annual disclosures under the NMC Act, and false records can still bring disciplinary or criminal action under other laws.

• The Supreme Court has held that fees for professional courses can’t be raised midway except in exceptional cases, such as an unforeseen jump in costs, and that fee regulators must fix the fee for the whole course before students are admitted. The case began when a West Bengal engineering college raised fees by about 37.5% for a batch already enrolled.

• IIT Kanpur director Manindra Agrawal says a third attempt at JEE Advanced could be explored in the coming years , after more than 12,000 students reportedly signed an online petition for one. He said there are no current plans to change the two-attempt rule, and flagged the exam’s heavy dependence on coaching.

• NCERT has developed an activity-based module on computational thinking and AI for Classes 9 to 12 , with IIT Madras and IIT Jodhpur, for students with no prior knowledge of AI. It covers data privacy, misinformation and fairness, pushes students to check AI-generated information rather than accept it, and can be taught with or without devices.

• PARAKH, NCERT’s national assessment body, wants districts to run a monthly cycle of targeted teaching and short tests to fix gaps found in its 2024 national survey, where average maths scores fell from 60% in Class 3 to 37% in Class 9. Each month, districts would pick weak skills, teach to them, test students with 18 to 30 questions, and send the results up through a Google Form.

Bihar

• Bihar’s education department has partnered with 11 IT companies, including Google Education , to train government school teachers in IT and AI at a central facility on the SCERT campus, with principals nominating who goes. The state also plans to make computer education compulsory from Class 6 in government schools from the next academic session, and to set up smart classrooms in its 700 model schools.

Delhi

• Chief Minister Rekha Gupta’s office says Delhi is planning hostels for 10,000 students across colleges and universities, to be run under a public-private partnership (PPP) model. The announcement gave no timeline or budget.

Goa

• Goa’s new AI Policy 2026 proposes compulsory AI fundamentals for Classes 6 to 12 from 2027-28 , with AI labs in 50 government schools and teachers trained through IIT Goa and NPTEL. It also targets 50,000 AI-certified professionals by 2030, at least a quarter of them women.

Kerala

• Higher Education Minister Roji M John told the Assembly the state has begun the process of appointing permanent vice-chancellors at all its universities, several of which lack a permanent V-C, with related cases pending in the Supreme Court and the Kerala High Court. He said his government would not strike the kind of closed-door understandings he alleged the previous LDF government had made.

Madhya Pradesh

• Madhya Pradesh’s school rolls fell by more than 8.6 lakh students in a year , about 6%, and the state has issued show-cause notices to officials in 10 districts. Officials worry the figure may reflect poor digital record-keeping rather than children leaving school. In September the state said it had hit zero dropouts at the primary level .

• Madhya Pradesh’s new coaching rules give existing centres 90 days to register and require mental health counsellors and CCTV , with each branch registered separately. Centres must also publish their fees, tutors’ qualifications and five years of results against enrolments on their websites.

Maharashtra

• Maharashtra has told public universities to keep contract staff out of sensitive exam work , a rule that also covers affiliated colleges, after a Mumbai University BCom paper leak in which a temporary staffer on exam duty was found guilty of serious misconduct. The state will also adopt the Nandan Nilekani-led central task force’s exam reform recommendations for state competitive exams once its report is out.

Odisha

• Odisha’s Cabinet has approved the ₹450 crore Dakshyata Vikas Yojana , a three-year skilling scheme meant to reach about 4.2 lakh young people, with skill hubs inside colleges running placement-linked courses alongside degrees. Students aiming for jobs abroad will get German and Japanese language training plus visa and travel support.

Telangana

• Telangana plans to invest ₹24,000 crore in Young India Integrated Residential Schools for Classes 5 to 12, meant to benefit about 2.7 lakh students. Officials said 72% of new admissions at its Arutla demonstration campus came from private schools.

• Telangana has ordered officials to draw up a policy to attract foreign universities to Bharat Future City , but the University of Birmingham, one of two named in reports citing state officials, told The PIE News it has no plans for an India campus. The University of London said it had nothing new to share beyond its August talks with Chief Minister Revanth Reddy, who set out that month to invite universities to Future City’s education zone .

Financial Reports & Market Trends

• Study-abroad platform Leverage Edu’s filed accounts show FY26 operating revenue of ₹364.4 crore, more than double the year before , with its net loss down 82% to ₹19.4 crore and more than 81% of revenue coming from outside India. That is a little below the ₹375 crore the company claimed in May, when it was reportedly set to raise a Series D at a valuation of about $300 million .

• The number of Indian students in the US rose 9.5% to 363,019 in 2024-25 , but the rise came from graduates on Optional Practical Training (OPT), up 47%, while the number in undergraduate, graduate and non-degree study fell 6.3%, driven by a 9.5% drop in graduate students. Common App also saw Indian applicants drop 15% in the 2025-26 season.

• 63% of Indians who studied abroad stayed on in their host countries, while 47% of foreign graduates who studied in India went home, according to Studyportals and Cambridge IELTS’ Talent Beyond Borders report . Canada keeps the most international graduates at 66%, with the US at 44%.

• 82% of Indian students in HP’s Futures 2026 survey worry AI helps them work faster but stops them learning deeply, and 42% still reach for printed or handwritten notes over AI summaries when they need to remember something. Yet 78% think AI will create more careers than it takes away . The survey covered 758 Indian students among more than 6,000 in 37 countries.

• More than 10,000 women qualified in JEE Advanced 2026 , a qualification rate of 23.4% against 21.7% last year and the highest in six years, according to the Joint Implementation Committee report. Women still made up only 20.22% of IIT seat allotments.

• In rural India, only 59 girls finish upper secondary school for every 100 boys , according to UNESCO’s 2026 Global Education Monitoring Gender Report, even though India has reached gender parity in urban areas. Globally, the share of girls married before 18 fell from 25% in 2000 to 18% in 2025, but it is still 25% in Central and Southern Asia.

Opinions

• Why does caste survive inside IITs and IIMs that have had reservation for decades? Anand Teltumbde follows the problem upstream , from coaching costs that filter students out before quotas ever apply to faculty posts that stay unfilled. He also makes a pointed argument about who reservation increasingly serves. Read it for where he thinks the fix has to start.

• Can an edtech app built on a student’s OTP sign-up survive India’s child-data rules? Siddharth Shrivastava walks through what the DPDP rules demand of edtech platforms , and why companies selling to schools and those selling to families end up in very different positions. Read it for the three operational problems he flags for consumer platforms.

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