It’s a bad week to be the education minister, as exam misery continues to haunt the Indian education system. The week started with a 19-year-old who claimed he could pull scanned Class 12 answer sheets off a CBSE server using just a web browser. Initially dismissive, CBSE was eventually forced to eat humble pie, admit the flaws were real, and patch them. Just as that felt like water under the bridge, another tech glitch sent 3,765 students sitting the CUET exam back for a re-test. With the NEET fiasco still simmering on top of all this, the education minister had to publicly own it and say "I hold myself accountable." It is not all doom and gloom in edscape, though. PhysicsWallah’s quarterly earnings call showed it is still growing while cutting its annual losses and inching toward profitability. And as Alakh Pandey smiled his way to the bank, a Singapore court ordered Byju Raveendran, of the eponymous edtech Byju’s, jailed for six months, a ruling he is contesting as a mere misunderstanding even as the company works to settle with its lenders.

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CBSE’s marking crisis goes from glitch to breach

What started as a buggy re-evaluation portal has turned into a question about who can see students’ answer sheets. CBSE this week admitted vulnerabilities in its service provider’s OnMark portal after 19-year-old cybersecurity researcher Nisarga Adhikary alleged a misconfigured cloud bucket let anyone on the internet download scanned Class 12 booklets across institutions. The board said the flaws had been "contained" and that the exposed system was a test platform with sample data, not the live evaluation engine, while Congress’s Jairam Ramesh called it a data breach touching two million students.

The breach allegation landed on top of a re-evaluation process that was already buckling. Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan acknowledged "some discrepancies" and accepted responsibility, telling NDTV plainly, "being the Education Minister, I hold myself accountable." Nearly four lakh students applied to see their scanned copies this year, against the usual two to two and a half lakh, covering close to 11 lakh question sets. On the ground it got personal: students in Delhi found whole supplementary sheets worth 20-plus marks missing from their evaluated papers, one Physics tutor said nearly 80% of his 120-student batch found errors, and his own son was hospitalised from the stress before the missing sheets came back with full marks.

The fixes are now being run by outsiders. Pradhan brought in four PSU banks to overhaul the payment gateway, State Bank of India, Bank of Baroda, Canara Bank and Indian Bank, after the portal flipped revaluation fees as high as ₹69,000, and roped in IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur teams to stabilise the site. Re-evaluation was pushed to June 1 for a cleaner run, with results to be synchronised with CUET-UG and JEE Advanced so admissions are not held up. A Parliamentary panel under Digvijaya Singh has summoned School Education Secretary Sanjay Kumar and CBSE chief Rahul Singh over On-Screen Marking and the three-language rule, alongside NTA on the NEET mess.

A full re-test, which some have floated, is the option nobody actually wants, since it would reopen results for over 17 lakh students who have already moved on to admissions.

The scrutiny has since reached the vendor itself. A Class 12 student, Sarthak Sidhant, published an investigation alleging CBSE quietly rewrote its tender rules in ways that favoured Coempt EduTeck, the firm behind the OnMark platform and formerly known as Globarena Technologies. After scraping hundreds of CBSE tenders, he argues the board loosened its blacklisting and financial-strength clauses so that Coempt cleared a ₹50 crore turnover bar by a sliver while a rival with far stronger finances was passed over, and notes the same firm ran the technology behind Telangana’s 2019 Intermediate results meltdown that wrongly failed lakhs of students. These are a student’s allegations rather than proven findings, and CBSE has not addressed them.

The unresolved part is trust, not technology. CBSE can patch a bucket and swap a payment gateway in a fortnight, but it still has to explain how a first-of-its-kind digital marking system shipped with this many holes, why this particular vendor was chosen to build it, and convince parents that the copies behind those marks were ever safe.

Funding & Acquisitions

• PhysicsWallah is showing what a post-listing edtech turnaround looks like. The Alakh Pandey-led firm grew FY26 revenue 35% to ₹3,900 crore and cut its full-year loss 90% to ₹24 crore, with Q4 revenue up more than 50% to ₹919 crore. Separately, PW’s board approved a ₹120 crore investment into its wholly-owned NBFC, FinZ Finance, which got its RBI licence last September, signalling a push into student lending alongside the coaching business it took public last year.

• Study-abroad platform Leverage Edu is set to raise over $20 million in a Series D at a roughly $300 million valuation, with equity led by Dubai’s Aditum Fund and venture debt from IDFC FIRST Bank. The Akshay Chaturvedi-founded firm more than doubled FY26 revenue to ₹375 crore and turned EBITDA-positive, and is reportedly eyeing a ₹2,000-3,000 crore IPO. The round more than doubles its last valuation of about $140 million, a rare up-round in a study-abroad market rattled by US visa uncertainty.

• College-discovery startup KollegeApply crossed 600 institutional partners and posted over ₹15 crore in revenue in its first full year, turning a profit out of the gate. The Gurugram firm says it has engaged two million users and facilitated 15,000 admissions, and wants to reach 1,500 partners next cycle.

• upGrad named Mukesh Mundra, a chartered accountant with 26 years in finance who joins from JioStar, as its new chief financial officer, replacing Venkatesh Tarakkad. The hire lands as Ronnie Screwvala’s firm finalises its $218 million all-stock takeover of Unacademy, a deal that values the once-$3.4 billion test-prep giant about 90% below its peak.

• A Singapore court sentenced Byju Raveendran to six months in jail for contempt over alleged non-compliance with asset-disclosure orders, and asked him to pay S$90,000 in legal costs. Raveendran, who plans to appeal, pushed back hard, calling it "a procedural contempt order, not a finding of fraud," and saying a settlement with lenders QIA and GLAS Trust is nearly done.

Partnerships & Strategic Initiatives

• IIIT Allahabad signed an MoU with TeamLease EdTech to launch a two-year online Executive M.Tech in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, aimed at working engineers and graduates. TeamLease comes in as the technology and delivery partner, the latest in a run of IITs and IIITs licensing their brand to edtech platforms for online degrees.

• Russia used the Indo-Russian Education Summit in Delhi to pitch a target of half a million international students by 2030, up from around 300,000 today, of whom nearly 40,000 are Indian. Ambassador Denis Alipov highlighted medical tie-ups linking Sechenov Moscow with IIT Bombay and the University of Delhi, as Russia courts the Indian medical aspirants increasingly priced out of Western options.

• India and Japan deepened their workforce pipeline at a Tokyo seminar of around 250 Japanese firms, where one industry chairman proposed a personnel exchange of 50,000 people over the next decade. Labour Secretary Vandana Gurnani pitched ITIs, apprenticeships and Japanese-language readiness, with Assam showcasing its FLIGHT foreign-language programme as a feeder for jobs in an ageing Japan.

• Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, speaking at the University of Toronto, floated India-Canada dual-degree programmes where students split study across both countries with degrees recognised on each side. The suggestion came with a pitch for a political reset and a possible India-Canada trade deal by end-2026.

Policy & Government

• CBSE’s compulsory three-language rule for Classes 9 and 10 is now in court. The Supreme Court issued notices to CBSE and the Centre seeking responses within four weeks, with a hearing set for mid-July, but did not stay the policy. The petition by 19 parents and teachers argues the May 15 circular contradicts an earlier CBSE communication that had deferred the rule to 2029-30, and warns of teacher and textbook shortages mid-session. Pradhan said there is no reason to panic, insisting the third language will not be part of board exams and that those objecting are about 1% of the system.

• The Centre is racing to make the June 21 NEET-UG re-test airtight after the May 3 exam was scrapped over a multi-state paper-leak ring. Pradhan reviewed security with former ISRO chief K Radhakrishnan, wrote to every state for law-enforcement support, and issued a heatwave advisory mandating water, fans, shaded waiting areas and backup power at centres.

• And then NTA had another bad day. A technical glitch from vendor TCS disrupted the morning CUET-UG shift, delaying it about two hours and prompting a one-time re-test for 3,765 candidates who left before the exam resumed. TCS said the issue was fixed "without any impact to the sanctity of the exam," but it is the second exam-administration stumble in a month for the agency.

• Two states moved on private school fees from opposite ends. The Delhi High Court ruled that private unaided schools can raise fees at the start of a session without prior government approval, needing only to file a statement first, in a 120-page verdict covering 137 schools. Tamil Nadu went the other way, ordering its 13,000-plus private schools to display government-fixed fees on notice boards or risk losing recognition.

• NITI Aayog held the first meeting of a new Education to Employment and Entrepreneurship standing committee, announced in the Union Budget, to chase a 10% share of the global services market by 2047. Chaired by NITI CEO Nidhi Chhibber, it pulls in seven ministries, four states and industry bodies including NASSCOM and CII to study how AI will reshape jobs and skilling.

• Jharkhand CM Hemant Soren ordered officials to scale CM Schools of Excellence from 80 to 5,000 and to end single-teacher schools within six to eight months, paired with a drive to re-enrol dropouts and child labourers.

• Meghalaya CM Conrad Sangma took a PGI-improvement plan to Pradhan, admitting the state has sat at the bottom of the Performance Grading Index for three years. With nearly 14,600 schools for a 30 lakh population, Meghalaya has already merged or shut over 3,000 lower-primary schools and is rolling out a unified pay structure, a teacher-training academy and compulsory Khasi and Garo instruction.

• Arunachal Pradesh launched a digital teacher transfer and posting system to cut out discretion and favouritism, enrolling 16,068 teachers, about 97% of the workforce, and issuing over 2,000 intra-district transfer orders. The portal targets a 1:45 teacher-student ratio in remote schools.

• Kerala’s new UDF government signalled it is open to private and foreign universities to stem the exodus of students leaving the state. Higher Education Minister Roji M John said the four-year undergraduate programme will be reviewed and restructured, calling it rolled out "without adequate preparatory work."

• In Telangana, a turf fight between the Council of Higher Education and the technical-education board over who approves new courses has stalled degree admissions, with disputed programmes in cybersecurity, airport management and hospital administration caught in the middle. CM Revanth Reddy, who also holds the education portfolio, is set to step in. The state separately barred schools and colleges from sharing students’ personal data with private agencies.

• Sikkim was declared a fully literate state under the ULLAS adult-literacy mission, with Union Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia announcing the milestone around the state’s foundation day.

Financial Reports & Market Trends

• Education borrowing in India is increasingly a working-age habit, not a college-fees one. A RupeeRedee analysis found that people aged 21 to 30 took nearly 46% of education-linked loans last year, with the average ticket size just ₹14,928 and most borrowers earning ₹20,000 to ₹40,000 a month. Around 77% came back for another loan within two years, and only 21% of these borrowers were women, pointing to small, repeat borrowing for skills and certifications rather than degrees.

Opinions

• Is rising school and college cost the inflation India keeps ignoring? One economist argues in Down To Earth that education prices have nearly doubled in a decade while almost never cooling, quietly eating 20-30% of household income. Read it for why this matters more than the headline CPI number everyone watches.

• A 40-member Telangana delegation flew to Finland to study its famed schools, and one educator who tracks state policy thinks they came back with less than the trip cost. His argument is not that Finland has nothing to teach, but that the lessons were already sitting in Telangana’s own policy. A pointed read on what governments actually buy with study tours.

• Is recorded video learning already obsolete? PhysicsWallah co-founder Prateek Maheshwari thinks so, telling Moneycontrol that the real prize is one-to-one conversational AI tutoring layered on live classes, with PW already using AI to handle most student doubts. Worth reading for where one of India’s few profitable edtechs thinks the next product war is.

Job Openings

• GetLitt! runs a gamified, literature-led reading and writing community for children. They’re hiring two Mumbai-based, hybrid roles: a Program and Growth Manager for someone with 3-4 years driving partnerships or programs in education or early-stage startups, and a Program and Partnerships Manager with 2-5 years in program design and scaling, ideally in edtech or development. Apply through their Google Form.

• The Akanksha Foundation runs a network of schools across Maharashtra. A school leader at its Kasarwadi, Pune campus is hiring a Consultant Project Manager to build a Library-Based Learning model, a one-year full-time role for someone who has taught English and Social Studies across Grades 5-8 and loves books. Send a resume and a short note to Neha.Thapa@akanksha.org and Parijat.Prakash@akanksha.org.

• SURAAH runs an alternative school in the Uttarakhand hills and is opening a second in Vikasnagar, Dehradun. They’re hiring a School Leader with strong leadership and relationship-building experience to run a school that "does education differently." Apply through their form or message the team.

• J-PAL South Asia, the policy research lab, is hiring a Research Manager (Scale) in Delhi or Bengaluru for its Every Child Counts early-numeracy programme, now reaching nearly 900,000 students across 11 states. They want a master’s plus at least five years of experience, including monitoring-and-evaluation design and proficiency in Stata, R or SurveyCTO.

• Khan Academy is hiring a Project Manager, Content Operations on a 12-month remote contract in India, managing state-partner documentation, content publishing and quality control. Applicants must complete a short task and submit it with their resume, or the application is ignored.

• KPMG’s Education and Skills Practice is hiring a Fundraising Professional in Chennai or Bangalore, for someone with at least three years securing funds and managing donor or investor relationships. Shortlisted candidates are contacted directly within two to three weeks.

• Emeritus, the global executive-education provider, is hiring for its Global Academic Delivery team in India on a remote basis, a role at the intersection of program management, learner experience and operations. The post explicitly welcomes career-changers and professionals returning from a break.

• Vedantu, the Bengaluru online tutoring platform, is hiring two office-based directors: a Director of Sales and a Director of Sales Strategy and Excellence, both wanting 8-12 years of experience and proven revenue or sales-ops leadership in edtech or high-growth startups. Apply to nishit@vedantu.com with scale owned and recent outcomes.

• Newton School, which runs tech-skilling and degree programmes, is hiring a Progression Manager in Hyderabad to own learner progression and outcomes.

• NatureNurture works on K-12 curriculum, content and teacher training. They’re hiring a Director of Academics in Hyderabad, full-time, for a senior academic leader with a master’s in education (doctorate preferred) and a track record in curriculum design and teacher development.

• Bambinos.live is a live online learning platform for children. They’re hiring a Head of Growth in Bengaluru.

• Codju sells AI, coding and future-skills programmes into schools. They’re hiring Senior Area, Territory and Regional Managers across Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Chennai, for candidates with strong school-leader networks and edtech or ICT sales experience. Send a CV to rohit@codju.com or bhim@codju.com.

• The Circle India, a Mumbai education nonprofit, is hiring a Senior Manager, Technology to shape its long-term technology strategy and build its learning platforms and systems. Apply via thecircleindia.org.

• Sunbird Trust runs school transformation, teacher training and access programmes, largely in India’s Northeast. They’re hiring across several roles including Education Program Manager, a Teacher Training Academy Head and Trainer, and fundraising and HR positions, with applications through the form on their careers page.

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