Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on July 25, only the second minister to quit under Modi over a scandal since 2014, and his bureaucracy turned over within days. Byju’s hit a fresh snag in its Aakash sale, Punjab made AI compulsory from Class 1, and private equity kept circling India’s premium schools. A minister has finally paid for a decade of paper leaks; whether the system that produced them changes is the fight Parliament takes up next.

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Spotlight

The exam-integrity revolt claims its minister

Five days after police baton-charged its march on Parliament, the protest movement got what it came for: Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on July 25, saying he did not want "anti-national forces" to exploit the standoff, and the President accepted it the same day, handing additional charge of the ministry to Pralhad Joshi. It is only the second ministerial resignation over a scandal since Modi took office in 2014. The bureaucracy turned over with him: Naresh Pal Gangwar and T K Anil Kumar took charge as the new Higher Education and School Education secretaries two days before Pradhan quit, the NTA sacked 47 officials and signalled more terminations to come, and the Cabinet cleared a bill that raises the minimum term for organised paper-leak rackets from five to seven years, topping out at 10 years and Rs 10 crore for the worst offences. Sonam Wangchuk, hospitalised by court order late in a fast that ran 26 days, ended it at Gurugram’s Medanta Hospital after Amit Shah and JP Nadda delivered a written government assurance on compensation and withdrawn cases. Stone-pelting broke out at Jantar Mantar within minutes of the resignation news, but by evening the government had agreed to compensate families of students who died over the leaks and withdraw every protest-related FIR, and protest leaders formally called off the strike, with written confirmation of the deal still due. Joshi inherits a ministry mid-overhaul, with no permanent successor named and a fourth round of reform talks due within four weeks.

Funding & Acquisitions

• Byju’s hit another snag in resolving its Aakash Educational Services saga. The NCLT paused the platform’s bidding process until August 31, after founder Byju Raveendran challenged a roughly $1.2 billion claim that would hand lender GLAS Trust Company more than 99% of creditor voting power. The pause comes just weeks after Think & Learn’s creditors approved a settlement valuing Aakash near $2 billion, a process Raveendran is now disputing from the other side of the table.

• KKR-backed Lighthouse Learning is reportedly in talks to buy two more Indian schools, Hyderabad’s Meru International and Bengaluru’s Millennium World School, for a combined ₹600 crore, according to people familiar with the matter. Meru’s spokesperson has denied any such talks are underway, so treat this as unconfirmed for now. It would be Lighthouse’s second big K-12 buy in weeks, after its ₹1,500 crore deal for Gurugram’s Pathways School.

• Listed publisher Dachepalli Publishers signed an MoU to acquire 100% of edtech firm Hara Communications, according to a stock-exchange disclosure. No financial terms were shared, and the deal is still conditional on due diligence, definitive agreements and regulatory approval.

• Fusion Klassroom Edutech, parent of edtech Klassroom, will open a ₹39 crore SME IPO on July 31 with a price band of ₹151 to ₹159 a share, valuing the company at roughly ₹148 crore at the top end. The issue closes August 4.

• Early-stage investor PedalStart led a ₹1.6 crore pre-seed round in UpKraft, a Bengaluru startup running AI-powered extracurricular tutoring in music and other skills. Co-founded a year ago by Tejasvi Singh Kushwah, Varun Mangal and Kritika Varandani, it currently operates in Bengaluru and Gurugram.

Partnerships & Strategic Initiatives

• SPJIMR and Great Learning are expanding their AI-led executive education partnership with three new programmes, a 7-month course for AI in business leadership, a 9-month CFO programme, and a 5-month GenAI-for-managers certificate. The push follows an IBM study finding 85% of nearly 2,000 CEOs surveyed globally expect every functional leader to become a tech expert.

• Swarrnim Startup and Innovation University in Gandhinagar signed a three-way deal with IIT Mandi and edtech Imarticus Learning to launch a 24-credit AI Minor degree. IIT Mandi designs the curriculum and faculty inputs while Imarticus handles delivery, the latest instance of an IIT licensing its AI credentials to a smaller private university.

• Manipur’s Dhanamanjuri University signed an MoU with Delhi University’s Miranda House to collaborate on higher education and research, along with a separate letter of intent for botany research between the two.

• Medhavi Skills University partnered with SANDIKSHA, the welfare association for families of Sashastra Seema Bal personnel, to offer full tuition waivers to children of SSB martyrs. It is MSU’s latest such arrangement after similar tie-ups with the Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, Assam Rifles and state police forces.

Policy & Government

National

• The Bar Council of India ordered physical, on-the-ground inspections of every law college it affiliates, scrapping the old affidavit-based compliance checks, after Supreme Court observations questioning legal education standards. Universities have six weeks to submit consolidated compliance reports.

• The government launched CHESS+ to teach chess in schools, starting with a pilot across 30 Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi. The programme pairs the All India Chess Federation with the Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti, with Minister Jayant Chaudhary framing it as building strategic thinking alongside academics.

• The Centre turned down Telangana’s request for a new IIM, telling the Lok Sabha that 604 of the state’s 2,070 higher education institutions already offer management courses. Telangana had offered 200 acres for the campus, but with 22 IIMs already running across 21 states, the Centre isn’t adding a 23rd.

Andhra Pradesh

• Andhra Pradesh’s education minister Nara Lokesh says 1.10 lakh students have shifted from private to government schools this academic year, as the state rolls out a "One Class, One Teacher" model across roughly 10,000 schools. CM Chandrababu Naidu also directed Wi-Fi and smartphones for every tribal household within three months, part of a push that has already added over 15,000 teachers this year.

Bihar

• Bihar’s Legislative Council passed 13 education and job-creation bills in one sitting, including a dedicated Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science University and a separate architecture and civil engineering university. Higher Education Minister Sanjay Singh Tiger pitched the package as reducing the need for Bihar students to leave the state for specialised degrees.

Delhi

• Delhi CM Rekha Gupta launched Project Manobal, a mental health education programme for government schools, at a Shalimar Bagh school in partnership with the Ladli Foundation and The Mind Sync. The Mind Sync’s programmes have already reached over 100,000 students and 1,500 teachers nationally.

Gujarat

• Gujarat launched Samras Vidya Setu, a campaign to re-enrol more than 80,000 dropout children from Standards 1 to 12. CM Bhupendra Patel says the state’s dropout rate has fallen to 2%, and Education Minister Dr Pradyuman Vaja says top-performing districts and teachers will be honoured on Teachers’ Day.

Himachal Pradesh

• The Himachal Pradesh High Court directed the state’s Education Secretary to appear in person if the government still hasn’t released ₹30.04 crore owed to schools by the next hearing on September 7. The funds were due under a compliance order from June 2, but the release proposal has been stuck after the Planning Department raised queries.

Karnataka

• Karnataka has filed FIRs against 249 guest lecturers found with fake PhD certificates, most of them, 154, in the Kalaburagi division, after a verification drive that also prompted more than 200 others to resign pre-emptively. Investigators say the bogus certificates were sold for anywhere between ₹50,000 and ₹3 lakh.

Kerala

• Kerala’s universities met to roll out the Bharatiya Bhasha Pustak Yojana, a Centre-backed push to write higher-education textbooks in Indian languages under NEP 2020. The Central University of Kerala’s vice-chancellor is targeting at least 100 Malayalam textbooks to start.

Punjab

• Punjab launched Sarbat.AI, making artificial intelligence part of the school curriculum from Class 1 to 12, a mission ultimately meant to cover more than 25,000 schools and 3.1 million students, though Phase I starts with Classes 8-12 only. New AI textbooks are due within 15 days, and the state made Punjabi compulsory across the same grades alongside it.

• Punjab CM Bhagwant Mann rejected opposition calls to sack his education and health ministers over exam integrity, pointing instead to a pharmacy exam cheating case in Faridkot where 21 people were arrested for using Bluetooth devices. Mann drew a line between organised "mass cheating" and an actual paper leak, which he says hasn’t happened on his watch.

Rajasthan

• Rajasthan reopened the recognition process for private schools from July 31, with a tightened timeline, inspection committees get seven days to report and District Education Officers 15 more, before a final decision. Minister Madan Dilawar framed it as a review of how private schools get certified in the state.

Tamil Nadu

• Tamil Nadu’s ruling TVK revived its demand to move education from the Concurrent List back to the states and to scrap NEET altogether, pointing to the 1976 constitutional amendment that centralised it in the first place. DMK’s M K Stalin backed the call on social media, calling NEET a failure.

Uttarakhand

• Uttarakhand Technical University cancelled two exam papers, Machine Learning for IoT and Electromagnetic Field Theory, after an external paper setter allegedly leaked around 50 questions over WhatsApp. Police arrested the setter, who has been barred from setting exams for seven years, following a complaint filed July 8 and a swift disciplinary inquiry.

West Bengal

• West Bengal set up a curriculum panel, chaired by Kalyani University’s Debashis Chatterjee, to rework school syllabi in line with NEP 2020 across Classes 1-12 and cut the system’s dependence on private tuition. The panel has two months for a preliminary report and three more for a final one.

• West Bengal’s higher education minister Jagannath Chattopadhyay said the state wants private investment and foreign university campuses, noting it has just 11 private universities against 32 in Maharashtra and 29 in Karnataka. He’s pitching the state as a host for one of the Centre’s five planned "edu-city" townships announced in the last Union Budget.

Financial Reports & Market Trends

• India placed 53 companies in TIME and Statista’s ranking of the world’s top 500 edtech companies, second only to the United States’ 188, and put three in the global top 10: Bengaluru’s unext at No. 3, ahead of Coursera, plus College Vidya at No. 7 and Adda247 at No. 9. The country’s best-known consumer unicorns barely register by comparison: upGrad lands at No. 434 and PhysicsWallah at No. 471 on the same list, while Unacademy and Vedantu don’t make the top 500 at all. The pattern repeats in the report’s "Rising Stars" list of the fastest-growing young companies, where India claims 5 of the 17 spots, more than any other country.

• Premium Indian schools are pulling in serious private equity money. CBRE data shows 28.2 million Indian households can now afford school fees above ₹1 lakh a year, but only 7.9 million students actually sit in premium schools today. That gap between demand and supply is why buyout funds keep circling India’s top school chains.

• A World Bank-backed $56.5 million project has pushed Nagaland’s Grade 10 completion rate up 13 percentage points, from 34% to 47%, in just three years, with National Achievement Survey scores for Grade 3 language and math also climbing. More than 130,000 students have been reached so far, over half of them girls, who now out-pass boys in the state’s board exams, 87% to 83%.

• Foreign-language fluency is turning into a real salary lever for Indian engineering graduates. Anna University says 2,023 of its 2,904 foreign-language students chose German last year, and one recent graduate landed a ₹30 lakh Japanese-company offer against ₹10 lakh domestic ones after clearing a Japanese proficiency exam. Colleges across Chennai, including RMK Engineering and Anna University, are now adding Mandarin for the coming academic year.

Opinions

• Nearly three in four Indian teachers already use AI in the classroom, yet only 57% can correctly answer a basic question about how it actually works. Outlook’s cover story follows two very different students through India’s uneven digital-access reality to ask what AI can actually fix in schools, and what it can’t. Read it for where the hype around AI in classrooms runs into the plainer problem of a third of schools still lacking basic digital access.

• Is sacking a minister and 47 NTA officials real reform, or just the most visible way to look like it? This analysis argues the week’s overhaul shouldn’t be read as pure capitulation, and lays out what would actually need to change, vendor certification, a real crisis-communication plan, admissions that don’t all hinge on one test, for it to stick. Read it for the sharpest take yet on what comes after the resignation headlines fade.

• Who actually profits from NEET? A Ken writer traces five years of his own reporting on the exam to a stranger conclusion: the coaching centres and quota brokers built around it may be the real winners, not the students who sit for it. Read it for a reporter’s own reckoning with a beat he’s covered since NEET became a national obsession.

Job Openings

• The National Testing Agency, which conducts India’s national entrance exams including NEET and JEE, is hiring four General Manager-level roles: Assessment R&D and Psychometrics, Test Centre Network and Operations, a Chief Information Security Officer, and Vigilance, Investigation and Forensics. Each role wants 12-15+ years of experience and specific certifications. NTA is separately recruiting 16 Young Professionals through UPSC’s Pratibha Setu portal. Applications close 30 days from the post, around August 24; email dir-admin@nta.gov.in.

• Khaitan Education Centre, a K-12 school and education-franchise operator, is hiring a Director, Franchise & Business Development at its Ghaziabad corporate office, with pan-India travel required. The role needs 12-15 years in K-12 school franchising, covering franchise sales, deal closures, MOU execution and school setup, plus a master’s degree (MBA in sales/marketing preferred). Send profiles to careers@khaitanec.com.

• Deshpande Skilling, part of the Deshpande Educational Trust, runs residential training campuses focused on youth employability, rural skill-building and teacher capacity development. It’s hiring a Chief Operating Officer in Hubli, Karnataka, looking for 15+ years of leadership experience managing large organisations or business units, with P&L ownership and a record of scaling programmes regionally to nationally. Applications go to phanindra.sama@gmail.com.

• Tetr College of Business, a QS Gold Award winning business school built around a global learning-by-doing model, is hiring across B2B Partnerships, Student Engagement and Retention, Sales Counselling, CRM Management and Entrepreneur in Residence roles at its global hubs. It’s looking for hands-on operators comfortable shaping postgraduate programmes in a fast-paced environment; job descriptions are linked in the post.

• Boundless Life runs project-based, place-based learning programmes for families across eight campuses on three continents. It’s hiring a fully remote Head of Education Excellence to lead curriculum, accreditation and its Education Center Directors network, requiring 10+ years leading education internationally with expertise in project-based, experiential learning.

• 21K School, a K-12 school focused on facilitator training and learning delivery, is hiring a Lead, Training & Programme Delivery in Bangalore (hybrid, full-time). It wants 5-10 years in academic training, teacher development or programme delivery, with facilitation, coaching and stakeholder-management skills; familiarity with Cambridge, IB or Edexcel curricula is a plus.

• Indian Institute of Creative Technologies (IICT), building out India’s ecosystem for animation, VFX, gaming and XR education, is hiring a Lead, Academics in Mumbai. It wants 12-18 years in academic administration, curriculum management or training delivery within creative-technology education, with a master’s degree (PhD preferred). Email neelam.tiwari@iict.org with the subject line "Application - Lead Academics, IICT".

• STEP Foundation, a systems-first skilling think tank incubated within The Convergence Foundation Network, works with governments, industry and training institutions to close India’s workforce-job market gap. It’s expanding its Delhi team across four roles: Senior Program Lead, Strategy & Operations, Program Associate, Apprenticeship, Program Lead, 10x10x and Program Lead, Strategic Communications & Partnerships.

• Teach For All, a global network of over 60 locally led education organisations, is hiring a Global Lead, AI for Programmatic Impact to help its network partners use AI to expand their programmatic impact. The fully remote role (open across many countries, including India) wants 8-10 years in AI, tech or programmatic work, ideally with a Teach For All network-partner background, plus strong coaching and cross-cultural relationship-building skills. Apply online with a resume and one-page letter of motivation; the role does not offer visa sponsorship.

• An upcoming IB Continuum school in Hyderabad is hiring a Founding Principal to build its Early Years and Primary Years Programme from the ground up. Candidates need proven IB leadership experience, particularly with the PYP, and a strong grounding in inquiry-based learning and curriculum development; experience founding a new international school is a plus. Send a CV and cover letter to arvindchalasani@gmail.com.

• HarperCollins Publishers India, which builds K-12 publishing and school solutions, is hiring a Lead, Product & Marketing across Chennai, Bangalore and Kolkata. It wants 8-12 years in product marketing, academic implementation or K-12 publishing, strong presentation and stakeholder-management skills, and willingness to travel 2-3 weeks a month. Email HR@harpercollins.co.in with the subject "Application - Product & Marketing (Location)".

• Wadhwani AI builds AI-powered tools to improve learning outcomes in public education systems. It’s hiring a Local Program Officer for Bihar, preferably based in Patna, looking for 5+ years working with government departments or education programmes, familiarity with Bihar’s education ecosystem, and fluency in Hindi and English.

• Things Education, a Bengaluru-based edtech building research-backed teacher training and classroom tools, is hiring an Academic Lead, full-time and on-site in Bengaluru. The role isn’t subject-specific; general expertise across grades and subjects and strong attention to detail are required. Email info@things-education.com with a short note on your interest and a professionally named CV.

• Hero Vired, the Hero Group’s edtech platform for outcome-based upskilling programmes, is hiring for its CEO’s Office, seeking professionals with 4-8 years of experience to drive strategic initiatives and business growth. Send a CV to mahesh.karthick@herovired.com.

• Math For All works on transforming mathematics education in India through teacher capacity building and research-backed programmes. It’s hiring a Project Lead to design early-childhood math initiatives and build partnerships with governments and nonprofits, looking for experience in math education, research or programme design. Send a resume, cover letter and current/expected CTC to mathforall.india@gmail.com.

• Piramal Foundation, working on girls’ education to address dropout and child-marriage barriers, is hiring a Program Director, Operations based in Maharashtra. It wants 12-15 years leading large-scale programmes, a master’s in public policy, education or social sciences, government-liaison experience, and 50-70% travel across districts.

• Dreamtime AIQ is hiring a Head of School Partnerships in the Greater Delhi area. It’s looking for someone with a decade or more of trust-based relationships with school principals and education leaders across India’s K-12 sector, rather than a transactional sales background.

• Parvaaz AI Incubator, a new initiative from J-PAL South Asia with UC Berkeley, MIT and Sabudh, is hiring a Technical Lead & Founding Instructor in Punjab to launch an AI entrepreneurship programme for university students. The role involves teaching students to build and deploy real AI products with modern coding tools and mentoring aspiring entrepreneurs, working closely with UC Berkeley and MIT researchers.

• Emeritus works with counsellor networks and study-abroad agencies to build enrolments for its international branch campuses. It’s hiring a Manager/Sr. Manager, Partnerships across Delhi NCR, Mumbai and Indore/Bhopal (6-8 years) to manage counsellor networks and recruitment partners, and an Assistant Manager, Events & Operations across Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru (4-6 years) to run partner conferences, webinars and counsellor meets.

• Vedantu, an online learning platform building partnerships with schools, is hiring a Director, B2B Institutional Partnerships in Bengaluru to lead its multi-state school sales organisation across products like IIT/NEET Foundation and CBSE Books. It wants a track record in B2B or institutional school sales and experience scaling on-ground sales teams across multiple states.

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