Heads finally rolled at CBSE: the chairman and secretary are out, and a one-member inquiry is on the marking vendor’s trail. Meanwhile PhysicsWallah’s lending U-turn won a 14% stock pop, Liverpool got approval for its Bengaluru campus, and Telangana wants 27,000 government schools folded into 4,000. The backdrop to all of it: chief ministers sit down with the Prime Minister on June 11 to redraw the education roadmap.

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Spotlight

Heads roll at CBSE, but the vendor stays

The accountability the street has been demanding for a month arrived in bureaucratic form. On June 2, the Centre transferred CBSE Chairman Rahul Singh and Secretary Himanshu Gupta and ordered a one-member inquiry under S Radha Chauhan, Chairperson of the Capacity Building Commission, into how the On-Screen Marking contract was procured, with a report due in a month. Gupta’s exit came with a sting: a "premature repatriation" on administrative grounds and an extended cooling-off that bars him from central deputation until December 2030. Hours later, IAS officer Prashant Sitaram Lokhande was named the new chairman and Varun Bhardwaj the new secretary, a day after the Education Ministry began pulling the complete tender records behind the Coempt contract.

The teenagers who started all this got their day in Parliament. Sarthak Sidhant, the 18-year-old whose scraping of CBSE tender documents alleged that eligibility clauses were rewritten in Coempt’s favour, presented his findings to the Digvijaya Singh-led Parliamentary Standing Committee on June 2, where one member reportedly asked why CBSE hadn’t already made him an adviser. Nisarga Adhikary, who was among the first to flag the portal’s security holes, was summoned but did not appear.

The re-evaluation machinery, meanwhile, limped into motion under fire. The portal missed its promised June 1 launch, opened on June 2, and promptly absorbed a cyberattack that generated 1.5 million hits in two minutes alongside over 100,000 unauthorised file-access attempts, followed by a 3.8 million-packet denial-of-service attempt on June 3. By June 4 the board had received 70,433 grievance applications, 63,119 of them for re-evaluation, ahead of the window closing at midnight on June 7. The strangest twist: after an IIT Kanpur red-team audit, CBSE migrated all answer-sheet data from Coempt’s servers to its own, yet retained Coempt to scan the disputed sheets, with an IIT official involved in the audit arguing that only about 30,000 of 40 crore scanned pages had problems.

The political temperature kept rising anyway. Rahul Gandhi called the transfers a cover-up, and on June 6 the satirical Cockroach Janta Party drew hundreds of students and parents to Jantar Mantar with a seven-day ultimatum for Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation, a movement whose petitions have reportedly drawn over 8 lakh signatures and which had students from DU, JNU and Jamia showing up despite wariness about its AAP links. The JNU Teachers’ Association wants Pradhan gone and the NTA scrapped outright. The government’s defence, delivered by Kiren Rijiju, is that CBSE and NTA are autonomous bodies and the minister "is not running away". Two officials are gone, an inquiry has a month, and a movement with a week-long deadline is promising to go national. The question the inquiry now has to answer is the one students have asked from the start: how this vendor was chosen, and why it is still scanning their answer sheets.

Funding & Acquisitions

• PhysicsWallah executed a rare public U-turn. Shortly after putting ₹120 crore into its lending arm FinZ Finance, the company scrapped direct lending and tied up with regulated third-party NBFCs instead, citing partner feedback that its strength is education, not underwriting. The market loved the retreat: shares jumped 14%, the biggest single-day gain in 11 weeks.

• Ex-Vedantu director Ravneet Singh’s two-month-old startup ProLearn raised ₹30 crore in a pre-seed round led by BEENEXT, with Eximius Ventures and Antler joining. It is building an AI learning companion for K-12 and test prep that listens, explains and questions at the learner’s pace. A sizeable bet in a segment where funding hit an eight-year low of $249 million in 2025.

• Apartment Eleven Eleven completed a 100% buyout of Byte Band Technologies, an AI platform that currently personalises CFA preparation and wants to expand into other competitive exams. The deal value was not disclosed, and one Byte Band co-founder stays on.

• AI education startup Agastya AI secured funding from Fairwinds Capital to expand across India and international markets and build out the second phase of its product roadmap. The amount was not disclosed.

Partnerships & Strategic Initiatives

• The University of Liverpool received its Letter of Approval to open a Bengaluru campus, handed over with both the education minister and UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper in the room, with programmes planned in business, computer science, game design, finance and biomedical sciences. Liverpool is one of seven foreign universities entering India through 51:49 joint ventures with Eruditus, which expects India to deliver over half its revenue within five years, up from 25% now, and plans to shift its corporate base back from Singapore.

• Australia’s University of Queensland took the opposite path: no campus, deeper partnerships. It signed a collaboration agreement with Lady Shri Ram College and renewed its joint PhD academy with IIT Delhi for five more years, a programme that already has 133 enrolled doctoral researchers. Indian students are UQ’s second-largest international cohort.

• Pune’s Nayanta University signed an MoU with University College Cork covering student and faculty exchange, joint programmes and research, with sustainability as the anchor theme, just as Nayanta welcomes its first undergraduate cohorts.

• Oracle Academy’s Project Vijay wrapped its pilot: a 12-week AI database programme that reached more than 6,000 students across 10 universities, deliberately including Tier 2 and Tier 3 institutions, with 64% of tracked participants completing the course. Oracle wants to scale the faculty-led model into a national network.

• The Eklavya Model Residential School network had a busy week. NESTS signed twin pacts, one bringing Bihar into the EMRS fold with ₹1.47 lakh per student in assistance, the other deploying CoGrad’s Medha AI platform free for two years to over 9,000 teachers across 499 schools.

• Separately, the Tribal Affairs Ministry and Bharat Petroleum completed 75 space labs in Eklavya schools across 18 states, built for about ₹12 crore in CSR money through ISRO-recognised agencies. Over 50,000 tribal students get launch vehicle models, telescopes and CanSat kits that were previously the preserve of specialised institutions.

• Singapore’s Global Schools Group committed ₹500 crore to expand K-12 infrastructure in Haryana, with an expected 2,000 jobs. It follows the group’s ₹1,051 crore MoU with Uttar Pradesh for 10 schools signed in March.

• The India Skills Accelerator, the Cabinet-approved partnership between the Skill Development Ministry and the World Economic Forum, held its first roundtable in Delhi with Apollo, Bajaj Finserv, TCS, Wipro and IBM at the table. The agenda: skills gaps in AI, advanced manufacturing and the green economy, plus new models for financing skilling.

• Former India A captain Priyank Panchal launched Sportsversity, an athlete-first sports education platform with five programmes spanning wellness science, sports media, sports business, athlete branding and family finance. The pitch is careers in sport beyond playing it.

Policy & Government

National

• CCPA fined PhysicsWallah ₹5 lakh for dark patterns: a ₹10 donation auto-added at checkout, guilt-trip messaging, and "free" courses that harvest contact details. McAfee got ₹1 lakh. The regulator has now penalised 31 coaching institutes over ₹1.39 crore.

• The UGC set graduated penalties for PhD plagiarism: resubmission at 10-40% copied content, a one-year ban at 40-60%, cancelled registration above 60%, with supervisors sharing liability. The catch, per OpenAI’s own APAC education head: no tool can reliably detect AI writing, and a third of ChatGPT’s 10 crore weekly Indian users are students.

• Pradhan reviewed the draft National Mental Health and Well-Being Policy for Schools, which positions teachers as first-level mentors. Public release expected shortly.

• Schools nationwide will run Green Summer Camps from June 5 to 30 under Eco Clubs for Mission LiFE, across seven environment themes.

• PM Modi chairs the NITI Aayog Governing Council on June 11 with education reform at the centre, pulling chief ministers into the Viksit Bharat 2047 roadmap days after a month of exam controversies.

• The All IITs Placement Committee is weighing a ban on sharing JEE Advanced ranks with recruiters after complaints that rank filters disadvantage SC, ST and OBC candidates. Approval is pending.

• NTA declared the NCET 2026 result, the gateway to the four-year ITEP that folds teacher training into undergraduate study.

Delhi

• Government school teachers want the ban on NIOS students entering science and commerce lifted, calling it discrimination against a board CBSE itself recognises.

Gujarat

• Colleges have pushed AI-ML and allied seats past 1,500 after adding over 500 this year. MSU Baroda is adding an integrated MSc in Data Science; Parul University goes further out on the curve with three quantum-computing BTechs.

Karnataka

• A value-education module enters Classes 1 to 10: 234 activities folded into regular subjects, one period a week, a lakh teachers already trained. It comes out of the SEP Commission report a cabinet panel took up in May.

Kerala

• Schools reopened with 4.2 million students on day one, and the two-week-old UDF government announced Nehru Centres of Scientific Temper and globally modelled Centres of Excellence. Kozhikode’s PRISM schools are the in-state template, and the new government is already open to private and foreign universities.

• The flip side: Idukki’s crumbling Munnar hostel is pushing tribal girls out of school, with 20 of about 60 residents gone and a sanctioned ₹40 lakh renovation yet to begin.

Punjab

• Private school fee hikes will be capped at 5% a year by ordinance, with refunds due where hikes crossed 15% over three years. The trigger: a 17-year-old in Amritsar died after alleged harassment over unpaid dues.

Tamil Nadu

• The state’s fee transparency order is being ignored: a TNIE check found only one of 15-plus Chennai schools had displayed approved fees by the June 5 deadline, and one Coimbatore school charged ₹21,000 against a fixed ₹11,790. The order came with a threat of losing recognition.

• The government reaffirmed its own education policy and its legal fight against NEET, launching the admission drive with a four-lakh enrolment target. The two-language policy stays.

• Physical education is now compulsory for Classes 6 to 12 in all schools after complaints that PE periods were becoming extra academic classes. It lands weeks after NCERT made PE formally assessed from Classes 3 to 10.

Telangana

• CM Revanth Reddy wants 27,000 government schools consolidated into 4,000 cluster schools offering free nursery-to-XII education, meals and transport. The maths: 27,000 government schools hold 18 lakh students; 12,000 private schools hold over 35 lakh. The boldest swing yet from a government that shelved its school-intermediate merger only weeks ago.

• The state’s welfare residential schools put up a striking JEE Advanced scoreboard: 163 students from social welfare gurukuls and 113 from tribal welfare institutions secured ranks, including a 200th rank in the ST category. The 37 social welfare Centres of Excellence produced 39 ranks below 5,000.

Uttar Pradesh

• NIPUN 2.0 extends the foundational learning mission to Class 5, with learning goals in Hindi, English, maths and EVS due by June 20.

Financial Reports & Market Trends

• Unstop’s Talent Report 2026 lays out a brutal paradox: 87.8% of companies are actively recruiting, yet 84% of undergraduates remain unplaced, alongside 85% of engineering and 74% of MBA students. While 73% of undergraduates expect over ₹5 lakh a year, only 40% get it. The numbers extend the gap NITI Aayog flagged earlier this year when it found only 54.81% of graduates employable.

• India’s fertility rate has fallen below replacement level at 1.9 births per woman, and Elon Musk pointed at education as the driver. An Economist analysis of the decline traces it to girls’ school enrolment surging since the 1990s, plus a "quantity-quality trade-off": the share of children in fee-paying schools rose from 31.7% in 2015 to 38.8% in 2025 as parents choose fewer children and bigger education budgets.

• Education founders took four of India’s slots on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia 2026 list: Jammu-based Cognitii (AI for special education) under Social Impact, Stimuler (an AI English-speaking coach reportedly past 6 million users, born at IIT BHU) under Consumer Technology, and two Telugu founders, Edodwaja’s lab-on-wheels FLOW Bus and Geni5 Ankura’s financial-literacy comics.

Opinions

• Is the answer to exam leaks really more security, or just more seats? Teamlease co-founder Manish Sabharwal argues in the Indian Express that India’s exam misery is a supply problem dressed up as a policing problem, built on regulatory choices like 16 lakh engineering seats against 1.3 lakh MBBS seats. Read it for the five false binaries he says India’s education regulation must abandon.

• When a TV anchor called India’s YouTube teachers "worthless", she may have aimed at the wrong target. A JNU researcher argues in Frontline that the real crisis is the systematic hollowing of the teaching profession itself, with over 35% of state university posts vacant and adjuncts too precarious to take intellectual risks. A must-read for anyone who thinks the NEET mess is only about exams.

• Why did 4.45 lakh people register for an entrance exam to a B.Ed degree whose graduates increasingly can’t find teaching jobs? A Countercurrents essay reads UP’s B.Ed rush as a social indicator rather than an education story, with 10,000 government seats against nearly 200,000 private ones. Dive in for the uncomfortable questions nobody asks after the exam ends.

• What happens when a flagship central scheme meets 28 different state agendas? ORF maps the many pathways PM SHRI has taken across eight states, from Karnataka’s cluster-linkage model to Haryana’s stalled rollouts and the states still wrestling with the Centre over signing on at all. Read it before the scheme’s final implementation year becomes a referendum on centrally sponsored reform.

• The Conversation examines how militarisation in Jammu and Kashmir is shaping girls’ education, with the region’s secondary dropout rate for girls peaking at 12.6% against a national 9.6%, and non-enrolment among 14-16 year old girls running at three times the rate for boys. A sobering read on what security architecture does to schooling.

• Can a Noida edtech out-tutor OpenAI and Google? PhysicsWallah co-founder Prateek Maheshwari tells Business Today why he thinks behavioural data from 135 million learners beats a better model, ahead of PW’s AI tutor launch this year. Read it for his claim about what actually decides the tutoring war in India.

Hot Startups

• ClassView | School Intelligence / Vision AI | Founder: Prashant Sharma

  ClassView (by Innovartan, Noida, founded 2023) positions itself as India’s first academic intelligence platform for schools: a vision-AI engine that quietly captures classroom lessons and turns them into actionable insight. The system scores every lecture on a benchmarked "Teaching Index," fact-checks what the teacher writes and says in real time, tracks syllabus coverage, and rolls everything up into dashboards for principals and parents. The pitch: give schools the data layer to coach teachers, cut academic inconsistency, and reduce students’ dependence on external tuition, all NEP-aligned. Founded by Prashant Sharma (ex-Allen, ex-Unacademy star tutor, two decades in test prep) with co-founder and CTO Ravi Sharma; the platform is deployed across schools in Haryana and scaling. Currently raising.

  Founder: Prashant Sharma | Website: classview.ai | Contact: ps@innovartan.com

• CURO Verse | Experiential Learning / Edutainment | Founder: Gaurrav Dhar

  CURO Verse is building what it calls India’s first experiential learning universe: a physical, multi-level discovery destination for children aged 3 to 15, sitting at the intersection of education, entertainment, and emerging tech. The venue spans four "worlds": a holographic interactive wildlife experience (HoloZoo), a hands-on STEM makers lab, a biophilic sand café with curated learning programs, and an immersive digital art floor, with an Explorer Passport that turns repeat visits into a personalised learning journey. The startup is planning its flagship in Gurugram, with a vision to scale across Indian cities. Founder Gaurrav Dhar comes from the premium film-production world (Cutaway Films), bringing storytelling craft to the build. Currently raising.

  Founder: Gaurrav Dhar | Website: curoverse.in | Contact: gaurrav@curoverse.in

Job Openings

• FretBox runs a campus residential-infrastructure platform serving 100,000+ students across 55+ campuses. They’re hiring a Regional Director, University Partnerships for South India, Hyderabad preferred with extensive travel, for someone who has sold enterprise technology to vice chancellors, registrars and CFOs. Apply at career@fretbox.in.

• American India Foundation Trust works on education, livelihoods and public health programmes across India. They’re hiring a Program Director, Education in Delhi to lead its education portfolio.

• Swami Vivekananda University, Barrackpore in Kolkata, is hiring a Pro Vice Chancellor (Administration) at ₹1.25 to 1.5 lakh a month for someone with at least 10 years in university administration, spanning UGC and NAAC compliance, governance and exam oversight. Send a CV with CTC details to bin.hiring@gmail.com with the subject "Application for Pro Vice Chancellor - Administration Position".

• PhysicsWallah is hiring a Director / VP of Product for Growth and Revenue in Noida at ₹60 to 100 LPA, for 12 to 15 years of product management with P&L ownership and consumer-scale growth experience. The search is running through recruiter Rohini Varshney on LinkedIn, with interviews already live.

• An IB school in Bengaluru (hiring via Teacher Pool) is looking for an Academic Head with 10+ years in IB and CAIE schools, including 3+ years as Academic Head, Assistant Head or IB DP Coordinator. Relocation to Bengaluru required; CVs to hr@teacherpool.in.

• Mahesh Foundation’s Utkarsha School in Belagavi serves underprivileged children. They’re hiring a Vice Principal and an Academic Coordinator for the 2026-27 academic year. Send a resume to jobs@maheshfoundation.org or call 8494945327.

• A CBSE school in Punjab (via School Teachers Foundation: India) is hiring a Vice Principal at ₹2 to 2.5 lakh a month, up to ₹30 LPA. Apply through the form.

• A leading early-childhood and childcare organisation (via recruiter) is hiring a B2C Sales Head for South India, based in Hyderabad or Bengaluru, to lead 30 to 60-member teams across multi-city operations. Profiles to pmatta027@gmail.com.

• upGrad’s Study Abroad Premium vertical is hiring a Sales Manager in Pune for someone who has built and scaled consultative sales teams with revenue ownership. Reach Saksham Upadhyay from upGrad’s talent team on LinkedIn.

• A merged test-prep powerhouse uniting big commerce and professional test-prep brands is hiring a Chief Operating Officer at its Mumbai headquarters, through executive search firm Apex Talent. The bar: 20+ years, a CA or Tier-1 MBA, and experience running a coaching business with 150+ centres and ₹500+ crore revenue.

• Central Square Foundation, the foundational literacy and numeracy nonprofit, is hiring a Project Lead (Consultant) for its RMEAL team in Delhi to lead research, monitoring and evaluation work shaping public education.

• ConveGenius works with state governments on education transformation. They’re hiring Senior Managers in Rajasthan and Himachal Pradesh and a Project Manager in Jharkhand for 7-8 years of education consulting or public policy experience, plus SwiftBharat Fellows in Uttarakhand for 1-3 years of field experience supporting AI-powered learning in government schools.

• Piramal Foundation’s Gandhi Fellowship Alumni Team is hiring four remote roles to serve its 3,500+ alumni network: two senior Product Developer positions, one for Community Activation and Leadership Transformation and one for Digital Platforms, Data and Systems Innovation, both 10+ years, plus Project Senior/Manager roles in Research, Monitoring and Systems and Communications, Events and Alumni Activation, both 3-5 years.

• Teach For All, the global education network, is hiring two senior remote roles: a Global Lead, AI for Programmatic Impact and a Director of Alumni Leadership, Asia Pacific, the latter explicitly open to India-based candidates, mobilising roughly 13,000 alumni across 20 network partners and asking for 8+ years in leadership development or systems change.

• LedBy Foundation, the leadership incubator for Indian Muslim women with 1,200 graduates and 70+ employer partners, is hiring a Head of Outcomes to own its full employer engine: relationships, funnel, outcomes and reputation.

• PlanetRead’s Billion Readers initiative puts same-language subtitling on broadcast content to build reading practice at population scale. They’re hiring Project Managers for SLS Operations at Doordarshan Kendras in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Chennai, an 18-month renewable contract requiring 3-5 years of operations experience and fluency in the local language (reading and writing Telugu, Kannada, Bengali or Tamil respectively). CVs to careers@planetread.org with the preferred location in the subject line.

• Crescendo Global is recruiting an Academic Manager in Pune for an education and learning-solutions client, with the listing seeking 3+ years in early-years academic operations and curriculum work. CVs to somya.jain@crescendogroup.in.

• Dalberg is opening a new research wing, the Observatory, and hiring a remote full-time Research Fellow on climate, education and gender themes. Deadline is June 15, so move fast; questions to DalbergTalent@dalberg.com.

• Pratham International is hiring a Product Manager, Digital, remote in India, to build offline-first, voice-first AI learning products for rural India and the Global South. They want 5-8 years of experience including 3+ in product management, with travel to field sites across India, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.

• Scaler is hiring a CEO’s Office generalist in Bengaluru, working from office, for 1-2 years of startup, consulting or founder’s-office experience on a new high-priority business vertical. The application link is in the post’s comments.

• Leverage Edu is scaling its walk-in experience centres after a successful pilot and hiring 100+ Consultants and Student Advisors across the country. Founder Akshay Chaturvedi is taking applications through the post.

• OneLern sells K-12 curriculum solutions into schools. They’re hiring Territory Managers and Area Managers in Ahmedabad, Rajkot and Surat for 5+ years of edtech curriculum sales with school-leadership networks. CVs to careers@fortunapix.com.

• Emeritus, the global executive-education provider, is hiring a Partner Operations Manager for University Partnerships with 5+ years in operations, program or partner management. The post explicitly welcomes career-restarters; comment or DM Shankar Iyer.

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