Niti Aayog put a number on the drift this week: 8.7 crore Indians aged 15 to 29 were in neither education, employment nor training as of 2021, and only 8.25% of graduates hold a job that matches their qualification. Meanwhile the Supreme Court told the Centre to stop hopping from one exam reform committee to the next, the Jharkhand High Court froze two of the exam cancellations the state ordered after last month’s agitation, and school children in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh took to the streets over broken buildings and filthy roads. The court’s inquiry into the police crackdown on student protesters was told to report at the earliest, with the case listed again on September 10.

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Funding & Acquisitions

• NoPaperForms, the parent of admissions software Meritto, reported profit after tax of ₹11.9 crore in FY26, up 6.3 times, on revenue of ₹115.7 crore. A ₹3.7 crore net tax credit helped the bottom line. The company cleared SEBI in March and is yet to file its updated offer document, and is reported to be targeting ₹500 crore to ₹600 crore at around a ₹2,000 crore valuation.

• Academic Capital Partners, co-led by Global Schools Group founder Atul Temurnikar and former PwC partner Vishal Thapliyal, is seeking up to $300 million for a debut fund to buy K-12 school assets, Bloomberg reported. Fundraising was due to begin within about two weeks, with a first close targeted for the first quarter of 2027, and the fund is looking at schools with EBITDA of $1 million to $5 million across Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, India, Thailand, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Temurnikar’s school group signed a ₹1,051 crore agreement with Uttar Pradesh for 10 K-12 schools earlier this year.

Partnerships & Strategic Initiatives

• The University of London is working towards a campus in Hyderabad, Telangana said after a roundtable at Senate House with teams from LSE and SOAS. Chief Minister Revanth Reddy’s delegation also met academics from Cambridge Judge Business School and agreed to build a framework covering teaching programmes, research and startup incubation in Hyderabad.

• France is running a four-city tour with more than 50 institutions in October, part of a target of hosting 30,000 Indian students by 2030. Indian enrolment in French higher education reached 9,100 in 2024-25, moving India from the 13th to the 11th largest source country. The participating institutions are mostly engineering schools, business schools and public universities. France’s push into India goes back at least to March, when KEDGE Business School opened a Mumbai campus with Vijaybhoomi University.

Policy & Government

National

• The Supreme Court told the Centre that setting up the Nandan Nilekani task force cannot mean discarding the earlier Radhakrishnan committee "lock, stock and barrel", and asked for an affidavit on what has been implemented from the older panel’s recommendations. Justice P.S. Narasimha said reforms should not be undone when the officers who ran them are transferred out, and asked what software, cybersecurity and storage the NTA has built. The matter comes back in three weeks.

• The Education Ministry announced a four-tier question paper checking system and the removal of 600 experts from the examination team the day before that hearing, with new experts being onboarded. Another 20 to 25 officials go in over the next two to three weeks. NTA offices are moving to new premises where security will be reinforced with CISF teams.

• Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee gave the Education Ministry 60 days to produce utilisation certificates for ₹10 crore of the ₹25 crore the NTA received when it was set up in 2017. Members asked officials whether the lapse had held up exam infrastructure, security arrangements or the setting up of test centres. The CAG report behind the hearing found nearly 34,000 such certificates outstanding across 15 ministries, covering ₹54,282 crore.

• A bench under Chief Justice Surya Kant formed a five-member panel led by former Supreme Court judge R. Subhash Reddy to examine the violence at last month’s student protests, covering both police use of force and violence against security personnel. The court named allegations of targeted violence and molestation of female protesters as the priority issue and wants a first interim report at the earliest. Police have been told to preserve CCTV, drone and body-camera footage. The case is listed again on September 10.

• The Education Ministry has begun implementing the free online coaching plan announced in the Prime Minister’s Independence Day speech. Education Minister Pralhad Joshi met higher education officials to review implementation and said the focus is a national platform carrying learning content, expert guidance and structured preparation. The government already runs SATHEE with IIT Kanpur for JEE, NEET and CUET preparation, and the new platform is expected to build on it.

• NCERT has reconstituted the 20-member team writing Class 11 and 12 Political Science textbooks, with at least four members linked to the RSS or its affiliates, replacing a panel notified in June 2025. The team has been told to make Indian Knowledge Systems and cultural rootedness cross-cutting themes. The Class 11 book is due by November 30 this year, the Class 12 book by July 2027.

• Niti Aayog has proposed three ways to put private companies inside technical education: dedicated public private partnership skilling institutes, skilling hubs inside existing colleges, and PPP-led reform of existing universities. Its report also asks for more autonomy at ITIs and polytechnics, including contract hiring of trainers and simpler procurement. It says many existing programmes prioritise enrolment and completion over placement, progression or income, the same outcome gap it flagged in its March working paper.

• The Delhi High Court held that consultancy and recruitment work done for foreign universities is an export of services, not intermediary services, quashing the rejection of a ₹2.63 crore GST refund to Fateh Education Consulting. The court said the firm billed the universities rather than students, had no power to bind them and could not guarantee admission, so it was not acting as an agent. The refund must be paid with statutory interest within two months.

Andhra Pradesh

• Education Minister Nara Lokesh pushed four bills through the assembly, all passed unanimously. One cuts the land a private university needs from 50 acres to 10 in the main urban corridors and 15 acres elsewhere, removes the minimum investment requirement, cuts the endowment fee to ₹5 crore and puts approvals on a 60-day online track. It also drops the requirement to partner a globally top-100 foreign university for joint degrees.

• A separate bill clears the way for 1,523 faculty appointments in state universities, where Lokesh said nearly 77% of teaching posts are vacant and the last recruitment was in 2012. It sets out rules for departmental reservation, seniority, promotions and supernumerary posts, which Lokesh said is meant to ensure the reservation and recruitment withstand legal scrutiny.

Delhi

• School students in Sonia Vihar, calling themselves Gen Alpha, took to the Sadhe Char Pusta Road demanding it be repaired and cleaned. Several schools sit along the stretch and thousands of children use it daily. Video of the protest went viral over the weekend, and the local municipal councillor has backed the demand.

Haryana

• A new standing order dated August 12 has pulled school education decisions up to the minister and the chief minister, superseding earlier delegation rules. Opening and closing schools, taking over privately managed institutions, board affiliations, admission portals and fee increases in government and private schools now sit with School Education Minister Mahipal Dhanda. Senior appointments, transfers of Group A and B officers and major policy go to the chief minister.

• A Gurgaon district court ordered a private school to admit a four-year-old within 15 days after it refused him a seat he had won in Haryana’s own computerised lottery, on the grounds that his home was more than 3 km away. The court called the state portal’s failure to filter school choices by address a procedural lapse the parent could not be blamed for. The school told the court that of 45 children allotted seats under the quota, one had been admitted.

Jharkhand

• The Jharkhand High Court stayed the state’s order cancelling the 11th and 13th JPSC examinations and the appointments that followed, giving relief to newly appointed officers who had challenged it. The state had scrapped 44 recruitment exams run by the JPSC and JSSC after a 25-day agitation by job aspirants over irregularities, a list covering deputy collectors, civil judges, assistant professors and forest range officers. The petitioners argued they were never heard, and that anyone found culpable should be dealt with individually rather than everyone losing a job they say they won fairly.

Karnataka

• The state will build 1,000 Karnataka Public Schools offering pre-primary to Class 12 in Kannada and English, School Education Minister Madhu Bangarappa said while laying a foundation stone in Shivamogga, funded through an Asian Development Bank loan and corporate CSR money. He also said the state is short 75,000 teachers and has begun hiring 15,000, the same number promised in the March budget alongside 800 KPS upgrades. Ajax Engineering’s trust is building the Shivamogga campus, 35 classrooms at a cost of ₹13.5 crore.

• Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar launched KEO, a compact desktop built on open-source RISC-V hardware with an on-device AI chip so it works without reliable internet. The first 1,000 machines go to government schools, with a stated plan to reach every government school across all 31 districts. IT Minister Priyank Kharge called it an inclusion device rather than a luxury one.

Maharashtra

• Cockroach Janta Party convenor Abhijeet Dipke visited a Zilla Parishad school in Latur’s Ausa tehsil on August 20 and demanded School Education Minister Dada Bhuse’s resignation, saying children were studying without proper classrooms, benches, toilets or safe access roads. He said the ministers’ dogs get better facilities than these students. He wants ministers and MLAs to enrol their own children in government schools.

• Two days later, Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde spent four hours reviewing the school education department and told it to work in mission mode on a time-bound plan to modernise government schools. The review covered teacher training and incentives, mid-day meals, health check-ups and student mental health. He also asked officials to communicate the department’s initiatives better to parents and alumni.

Meghalaya

• The state Cabinet cleared six education bills, including two to set up new private universities, one of them Presbyterian University Meghalaya. Two others make the Governor the Visitor instead of a sponsor appointee and add state representatives to the governing boards of MIT University of Meghalaya and Mahatma Gandhi University. A third restricts Martin Luther Christian University’s operations to Meghalaya and removes its distance education and college affiliation powers to match UGC rules.

Uttar Pradesh

• Students at a school in Bhattpurwa Samuhi village sat outside their classrooms and refused to go in until an official came and promised them a new school building, which has been pending for years. The principal repeatedly urged them to return to class and they refused. It is the fourth such protest reported in the state, after around 300 children marched 6 km to the Hamirpur collectorate over a road, 250 girls in Lucknow protested teacher shortages, and more than 200 students blocked the Mohan-Bangarmau route in Unnao.

Financial Reports & Market Trends

• An estimated 8.7 crore Indians aged 15 to 29 were in neither education, employment nor training in 2021, Niti Aayog said, drawing on the 78th round of the National Sample Survey. Only 8.25% of graduates work in roles that match their qualification. The report says this group cannot afford paid skilling because they have no income and have already spent money on their education, and it asks for subsidised training and learn-while-earning options.

• PhysicsWallah will launch a one-on-one AI tutor next quarter, already in beta, which nudges students towards concepts and asks questions rather than waiting for prompts. The company says testing with 300 students showed a hallucination rate under 1%, which it credits to training on its own lecture archive, and that voice-to-voice tutoring currently costs it about $0.20 an hour. Online NEET collections fell 28% in the June quarter, and management said the delayed exam cycle cost it 1 lakh to 1.5 lakh online enrolments.

• Collecting phones in a box at the start of a lecture raised grades slightly across 16,955 students at 10 higher education institutions in Odisha, a trial considerably larger than most classroom phone experiments. The average effect was 0.086 standard deviations, but students with weaker prior grades gained roughly twice that. Observers also recorded fewer off-topic conversations and teachers spending more time on teaching material, though the paper is still a working paper and not peer reviewed.

• A US trial of an AI maths tutor across 6,997 middle school students changed what happened after mistakes. Among students in the trial’s mastery track who got a question wrong, the tutor raised the chance the next attempt was correct by 8.5 percentage points, but added 2.88 minutes to reaching that correct answer, so students got through less material in the same class. A week later, within that same group, 40.2% of AI students answered a practised question correctly against 37.0% on the platform alone, which the authors call suggestive rather than definitive.

Opinions

• Is the problem that young Indians lack degrees, or that the degrees do not do anything? Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, asked about the Jantar Mantar protests, argues the fix lies in what sits between a qualification and a job, and offers a sharp reading of why the protest never settled into one demand. Worth reading for how the government’s most powerful economic voice frames the education to employment gap, and for what she says the private sector will and will not do about it.

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