Bharat Edscape Weekly - Issue #30

PhysicsWallah posted its highest-ever quarterly revenue, ₹1,242 crore, and doubled its profit to ₹142 crore. A paper from the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister noted that 39% of sanctioned faculty posts at IITs were vacant in March 2023. Telangana is folding its 55-year-old intermediate system into school education, NEET-PG could move to a rank-based system from 2027, and Unacademy co-founder Gaurav Munjal has handed the CEO job to Akhilendra Kumar.

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Funding & Acquisitions

• Unacademy co-founder Gaurav Munjal has moved from CEO to executive chairman , handing the top job to Akhilendra Kumar, a little over two months after upGrad completed its all-stock acquisition of Unacademy. Munjal says he will stay involved in operations every day and help with upGrad’s planned IPO. The move comes weeks after reports that he and co-founder Roman Saini are raising a ₹700 crore venture fund, Longshot Capital .

• NIIT Learning Systems has acquired US-based Bluewater Learning for up to $17.6 million, including performance-based earnouts over five years. Founded in 2003 and based in Plano, Texas, Bluewater helps companies plan and run their learning and talent technology, and has served more than 1,100 clients.

Partnerships & Strategic Initiatives

• IIT Kharagpur has become the first IIT to offer postgraduate medical degrees , with six MD programmes accredited by the National Medical Commission (NMC). The first batch will be just 12 students, two per specialisation, with seats offered in Round 2 of NEET-PG 2026 counselling at its Dr B C Roy Multi-Speciality Medical Research Centre. Director Suman Chakraborty says the goal is to produce innovators as well as medical specialists.

• PhysicsWallah’s startup arm, School of Startups, has signed a two-year MoU with the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) to back early-stage ventures in smaller cities and rural areas with training, mentoring, incubation, investor access and seed funding. Its PW Udyami programme pairs 90 days of live online training with a year of mentorship, and it also runs a six-month deeptech accelerator.

• The Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations (CISCE) is planning a national study with the OECD to benchmark its schools against international standards, according to reports, with Class 10 students from selected ICSE schools sitting PISA for Schools in November. Each school would get its own report, with the OECD preparing a national report for CISCE. The board’s own SHINE assessment for Classes 4, 6 and 9 runs online on November 15 and December 7.

• BITS Pilani will cover full tuition for the top 1,000 BITSAT rankers from 2027 , for students with annual family income up to ₹20 lakh who keep a CGPA of at least 7.5. Group Vice-Chancellor V Ramgopal Rao says the number of top-1,000 rankers joining BITS rose 50% in 2026, after an earlier scholarship for the top 500.

Policy & Government

National

• A 12-member expert committee has told the Supreme Court that NEET-PG and NEET-SS should move from percentile cut-offs to a rank-based system from 2027, and the National Medical Commission (NMC) has given in-principle approval, though detailed rules are yet to be finalised. The panel was set up after the qualifying cut-off was repeatedly lowered to fill vacant seats, most recently in January 2026, when the General category bar dropped from the 50th to the 7th percentile. It says eligibility standards should not be lowered just to fill seats.

• Students in teacher training courses recognised by the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE), such as B.Ed. and D.El.Ed., will have to teach five to eight non-literate adults under the ULLAS adult literacy scheme, according to Education Ministry guidelines launched on October 28. They only get their credits once those adults pass the literacy test, there is no payment, and the guidelines don’t say which batch the rule starts with . India has 15,509 recognised teacher education institutions with about 17.8 lakh approved seats.

• The Nandan Nilekani-led task force on exam reform has been given until January 2027 to submit its report , PTI reports, citing sources, after receiving more than 50,000 suggestions. The same source said the government has filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court on the panel’s progress. The panel has also consulted former ISRO chief K Radhakrishnan, whose 2024 committee the court said must not be discarded “lock, stock, and barrel” because of the new task force.

• NCERT plans to release new Class 10 textbooks by December , about three months before the 2027 session starts, with language books due by November 20, according to media reports. Director Dinesh Prasad Saklani reportedly said the syllabi will go to CBSE by November 15. NCERT sold 70.9 million textbooks in 2026-27, the most in its history.

• NCTE is promoting MITRA and PUSHTI , two programmes the Education Ministry launched in March 2024, which connect teachers with experienced mentors and set out the skills they should build over a career. Mentoring isn’t mandatory. NCTE chairperson Pankaj Arora says one of the main challenges is getting teachers to see it as help rather than extra admin work, and finding the time in short-staffed schools.

• Education Minister Pralhad Joshi launched three digital tools for Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan (KVS) , led by an AI-integrated Vidya Samiksha Kendra with real-time dashboards on attendance, academic performance, infrastructure and admissions. Its “Samiksha” bot analyses the data, flags gaps and suggests interventions, and a parent app shows attendance, syllabus progress and results. Joshi also wants teachers’ training records added to the system.

Andhra Pradesh

• Andhra Pradesh has made a 360-hour, 12-credit semester internship mandatory in the final year for undergraduates at all state universities and affiliated colleges, from November 16, 2026. Colleges must prioritise paid internships listed on the state council’s new Institute-Industry Connect portal, and unpaid ones are allowed only when no suitable paid option is available.

Jammu and Kashmir

• Jammu and Kashmir has notified its Private Universities Rules 2026 , which require private universities to reserve at least 25% of seats, and of teaching and non-teaching jobs, for domiciles of the Union Territory. Applications get a first scrutiny within 30 days, and penalties cover irregular admissions, excess fees, invalid degrees and faculty shortfalls.

Karnataka

• Karnataka will open English-medium sections in all 48,527 government schools from the next academic year, while keeping Kannada-medium sections running. The programme began in 6,539 schools in 2019-20, and its aim is to stop families moving children to private schools. Education Minister Madhu Bangarappa told the Assembly in December 2025 that government schools had lost roughly 17 lakh students in 15 years .

Kerala

• Kerala has let self-financing and aided autonomous colleges start new self-financing courses, or add seats to existing ones, without a no-objection certificate (NOC) , though aided autonomous colleges must tell the government first. Self-financing colleges will now renew their NOCs every three years instead of every year. Opposition leader Pinarayi Vijayan wants it withdrawn as a step toward commercialisation, while Higher Education Minister Roji M John says it supports academic autonomy and won’t dilute merit or reservation.

Odisha

• Odisha’s regular undergraduate admissions rose by 14,758 this year to 1,78,937, and Higher Education Minister Suryabanshi Suraj credits the state’s free KG-to-PG scheme , Gyanodaya Shiksharu Samruddhi. Kalahandi led the aspirational districts with an enrolment rate of 99.09%. The cabinet approved the scheme in July at a five-year cost of about ₹5,467 crore.

Telangana

• Telangana will merge intermediate education into the School Education Department and move to a Class 12 system from the next academic year, ending a standalone setup that has run for 55 years. Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy says an average of 40% of students drop out after Class 10. The Intermediate Education Joint Action Committee has threatened protests, while private school managements welcomed the move and asked for a clear process to add Classes 11 and 12.

Financial Reports & Market Trends

• PhysicsWallah posted its highest-ever quarterly revenue, ₹1,242 crore in Q2 FY27 , up 18.2%, and doubled its net profit to ₹142 crore, after a net loss in the June quarter . Management has slowed new offline centres to 25-30 a year to focus on making each centre profitable, and now runs 370 of them.

• Vedantu’s revenue from operations grew 17.6% to ₹267 crore in FY26 , and its loss before exceptional items and tax narrowed 18.6% to ₹171 crore, according to filings reviewed by Entrackr. Employee costs fell 12.8%, while total expenses stayed largely flat at ₹442 crore.

• Higher education enrolment grew 31.5% between 2014-15 and 2023-24, but the number of teachers grew only 17.6%, according to an Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) working paper . In March 2023, 39% of sanctioned faculty posts at IITs and 31% at IIMs were vacant. The authors warn the figures aren’t a precise like-for-like comparison, and want governments to check faculty and lab capacity before approving new institutions or courses.

• India had 5.4% fewer reported schools in 2025-26 than in 2018-19 , with primary-only schools down 12.6% while schools offering Class 12 rose 29.7%. The same EAC-PM paper argues that a falling school count is not a count of closures, since school codes also disappear through mergers, upgrades and corrections to the records.

• Real estate consultancy CBRE estimates India will need 1.0-1.5 billion sq ft of additional private education space by FY35 , with private unaided K-12 schools accounting for about 0.9 billion sq ft. It expects enrolment in private unaided schools to rise from 99 million in 2025-26 to 111 million in 2034-35.

Opinions

• What happens to a generation taught by institutions that have learned to be careful? Former civil servant Ashish Joshi and advocate Harshita Khetarpal trace a decade of changes in how Indian education is funded, run and taught , starting from photographs young protesters took inside crumbling government schools. They also give the government’s growth numbers a hearing. Read it for what they find when the pieces are read together.

• What should India do about its weak teacher-training colleges, with NEP 2020’s 2030 deadline approaching? Retired civil servant Vikram Sahay looks at what the NCTE has and hasn’t done about the more than 15,000 institutions that train India’s school teachers. Read it for the shift he thinks the regulator has to make.

• Why have Indian Americans given an estimated $3 billion-plus to US universities since 2008, when those universities already have billions? Lakshay Gupta, who works on fundraising at the Indian School of Business, looks at why India’s public universities rarely ask for donations , starting from student protests over fees and hostel meal prices at Panjab University. Read it for what he learned from advancement offices at nine US universities, and what he thinks Indian public universities are missing.

Others

• Moving backgrounds keep children watching educational videos for longer, but their eyes go to the motion rather than the lesson, according to an ISB and Santa Clara University study of more than 32,000 “made for kids” YouTube videos . A 10% rise in visual motion was linked to about 1.1% more views, and an eye-tracking test with children aged 6 to 10 found the extra attention went mostly to the moving background.

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