The IAS officer who ran Karnataka’s public service exams is now in custody over them, and Bihar has postponed its civil services exam to rebuild it as a single test. Meanwhile upGrad closed its Unacademy purchase for just over $200 million, Lightspeed sold out of PhysicsWallah entirely, and half of India’s university-bound Cambridge students picked an Indian college over an overseas one.

I’d love to hear what you think. Push back, agree, or share what I missed. Drop me a note at me@sandeepmallareddy.com. And if this is worth a spot in your inbox every week, go ahead and subscribe

Spotlight

The exam clean-up moves to the states

The repair job that started with the NTA is now running in three places at once. In Karnataka, IAS officer Gyanendra Kumar Gangwar, who was Controller of Examinations at the state Public Service Commission when the Veterinary Officers’ recruitment allegedly went wrong, was taken into custody after failing to cooperate across two days of questioning, a week after the Enforcement Directorate raided his homes in Bengaluru and Bareilly. Days earlier, Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar had set up a five-member Cabinet sub-committee under Health Minister U.T. Khader whose first task is exam and recruitment integrity, including a fixed, time-bound exam calendar, with a report due in a month. In Bihar, the state has postponed the BPSC examinations to switch to a single-test format, a decision Education Minister Mithilesh Tiwari said followed the Chief Minister’s intervention after student demands, with new dates to be announced later. The anger predates the decision: protesters at Patna’s Gandhi Maidan want the BPSC chairman dismissed and an inquiry committee set up, and police had earlier used water cannons on students marching to Raj Bhavan. At the Centre, the personnel ministry named an IPS officer and an IAS officer as new NTA directors and an IRS officer as joint director, giving them three weeks to take charge or face debarment from the Central Staffing Scheme, on top of the four-tier paper checking system and the removal of around 600 experts the ministry announced in August. Every one of these fixes is administrative. None of them has yet been tested by an actual exam.

Funding & Acquisitions

• upGrad has closed its acquisition of Unacademy for just over $200 million, a 100% share swap valued at ₹1,955 crore that finally lands a deal first discussed in 2020 and called off in January. Gaurav Munjal stays on as Unacademy’s chief executive, and Unacademy’s investors get one seat on upGrad’s board. Munjal says the company runs at a topline of around ₹400 crore with ₹900 crore in cash, and the purchase gives upGrad an entry into online test preparation, from UPSC to JEE, NEET and GATE. upGrad’s own gross revenue crossed ₹2,000 crore in FY26 with losses down 52%.

• NoPaperForms, the parent of admissions software Meritto, has filed its updated draft papers with SEBI for a ₹375 crore fresh issue plus an offer for sale of up to 3.8 crore shares. Info Edge is the only investor selling. About ₹148 crore of the fresh money goes to technology and cloud infrastructure and ₹96 crore to winning and keeping customers. It had cleared SEBI in March and had not filed the updated document until now.

• Lightspeed has exited PhysicsWallah entirely through a ₹550 crore block deal on the NSE, selling its full 4.67 crore shares, a 1.61% stake, at ₹117.72 apiece. ICICI Prudential Mutual Fund took the largest chunk at ₹259 crore, with Citigroup, Goldman Sachs entities, Morgan Stanley Asia and the New York State Teachers Retirement System among the other buyers. The stock gained as much as 5% that day and closed at ₹126.13, above the price Lightspeed sold at.

• LEAD Group returned to growth in FY26, with operating revenue up 10% to ₹386.6 crore and losses narrowing 20% to ₹34.5 crore. Operating EBITDA jumped sevenfold to ₹30 crore. That is a change of direction after a year in which revenue stayed flat, and books, teaching aids and devices now bring in more than 71% of what the company earns.

• Stoicap Ventures has launched a Category-1 alternative investment fund targeting ₹750 crore to buy K-12 schools and student housing and lease them back to operators on 25 to 30 year agreements. It cleared SEBI in June and has already lined up seven schools and 2,000 student beds. India’s education-linked property market is put at roughly $49 billion, about $37 billion of it in K-12.

• Voice-first tutoring startup YoLearn.ai raised an undisclosed seed round led by ABP Education, after a $500,000 pre-seed at a $5 million valuation. ABP’s Headword Publishing and KIPS Learning will turn their school books into AI tutors students reach by scanning a code in the textbook, across a combined network of around 25,000 schools. The tutor answers by voice in 22 Indian languages and marks practice tests against board exam patterns.

• Chennai’s Kruu is raising a $1.5 million bridge round and expects to drop "edtech" from its legal name, becoming Kruu Discovery Private Limited. Founder Anil Srinivasan is blunt that he does not want the label, positioning the company as a talent discovery and assessment platform built on project work rather than courses or credentials. It works with 648 schools across 13 countries and 127 professors who set the problems, and plans to raise more than $5 million next year.

Partnerships & Strategic Initiatives

• Duolingo has launched a Learn English from Punjabi course, letting Punjabi speakers begin learning English from Gurumukhi. It is the company’s second North India regional course after Hindi, joining Bengali, Telugu and Tamil. Punjabi has more than 100 million speakers worldwide, and the launch campaign is built around the phrase "Ullu Da Pattha".

Policy & Government

National

• Revised NCERT textbooks for Classes 10, 11 and 12 are being written in "mission mode", Education Minister Pralhad Joshi said, the senior-school end of a rewrite that has already reached several lower classes. The books follow the National Curriculum Framework for School Education and are meant to cut content load in favour of competency-based learning.

• More than 12,000 IIT aspirants have petitioned the Education Ministry, the IIT Council and the Joint Admission Board for a third JEE-Advanced attempt, or for the existing two attempts to be spread over three years instead of two. Their argument is the inconsistency inside the same admission system: JEE-Main can be taken six times across three years, and it already screens the field down to 2.5 lakh candidates. They also say a single-day, high-pressure paper punishes students who fall ill or need an extra year to build up.

• Cockroach Janta Party chief Abhijeet Dipke has written to the education ministers of every state asking for data on government schools, with six specific questions: schools renovated in five years, sanctioned versus filled teaching posts, money allocated versus money spent, how many more schools are needed, what non-teaching work teachers are given, and how many schools have working toilets, computers and proper sports facilities. He wrote that nearly 80 years after Independence children still study without safe drinking water, functional toilets or benches.

Andhra Pradesh

• Andhra Pradesh has begun a State Learning Achievement Survey covering 2,88,820 students in Classes 5, 7 and 9 across 5,766 schools, all 28 districts and 663 mandals. Students answer multiple-choice questions in Telugu, English and Mathematics on OMR sheets, which are scanned to produce mandal-wise and district-wise readings rather than a single state number. The survey runs every two years, with earlier rounds in 2022 and 2024.

• Private medical and dental college fees in the state go up 10% for undergraduate courses and 15% for postgraduate and super-speciality ones. MBBS under the management quota moves from ₹13.20 lakh to ₹14.52 lakh, and the NRI quota from ₹39.60 lakh to ₹43.56 lakh. The government called the structure interim, because the state’s Higher Education Fee Regulatory and Monitoring Commission is not fully constituted, and said colleges must refund the difference if the final fee comes in lower.

Maharashtra

• The state has asked its Fee Regulatory Authority to study whether autonomous colleges and private universities should come under its control, after years of complaints from students and parents. That is roughly 300 autonomous colleges and 34 private universities currently setting their own fees, in a state where trusts are increasingly applying for private university status precisely because the rules are lighter. An official said the state has no comprehensive record of what these institutions charge relative to what they provide.

• Only 40% of seats at Maharashtra’s two new private health sciences universities will go to state-domiciled students, with the universities asking that the other 60% be filled through the Centre’s Medical Counselling Committee, a request the state has forwarded. Parents and activists say the conversion costs state aspirants more than 350 seats. Lata Mangeshkar University and Dr Balasaheb Vikhe Patil University, the two contenders that emerged when the state amended its Private Universities Act to allow medical institutions, are still mid-conversion and missed the first admission round entirely, leaving students unsure what seats or fees to expect.

• Senior education officials will spend four days visiting schools in their districts under a new Chala Shalet Jauya campaign, checking buildings, drinking water, toilets and teaching quality, with a separate focus on reading, writing and arithmetic from Balvatika to Class 3. Education Minister Dada Bhuse said much of what needs fixing can be done locally without waiting for big money. It comes as CJP’s campaign asking parents to audit basic facilities in government schools keeps drawing attention to conditions in BMC schools.

Meghalaya

• Meghalaya has launched Read & Rise, with a three-month target for every child above seven to be able to read. Chief Minister Conrad Sangma launched it as part of the state’s wider CM-IMPACT school reform push, along with a teacher training guide for the programme. Three months is an unusually short deadline for a foundational literacy target, and the state has said it will monitor implementation and change course where needed.

Tamil Nadu

• Tamil Nadu will set up an Institute of Excellence in Basic Sciences on the lines of IISc, through separate legislation giving it degree-awarding powers and the autonomy to run as a university. The same demand for grants promised collateral-free education loans of up to ₹20 lakh from 2026-27 and 6,000 assistant professor posts across government arts, science, engineering and polytechnic colleges in three phases. It comes in a year when the department’s own allocation fell by ₹101 crore to ₹8,393 crore.

• The state will cover full undergraduate tuition for Muslim women admitted under the government quota at government, aided and self-financing institutions, across arts, science, engineering, medicine, agriculture and law, with ₹20 crore allocated to start. The Wakf Board scholarship for Muslim girls has been extended from Classes 1 to 8 up to Classes 9 and 10, reaching 41,384 students at a cost of ₹8.28 crore. A new minorities women’s college is also planned for Chennai.

Financial Reports & Market Trends

• Higher education enrolment reached 4.50 crore in 2023-24, up 31.5% over a decade, with the gross enrolment ratio at 30%, still twenty points short of the 50% that NEP 2020 wants by 2035. Female enrolment grew faster than the total, up 42.2% to 2.24 crore, and the gender parity index moved from 0.92 to 1.08, having tipped past parity in women’s favour.

• The institutional build-out behind those numbers was large: the count of universities rose from 760 to 1,289 between 2014-15 and 2023-24, a 69.6% jump, while colleges went from 38,498 to 48,246, a 25.3% rise. Standalone institutions grew about 24% to 15,221. Universities multiplied nearly three times faster than the colleges most students actually attend.

• Half of Cambridge learners in India headed to university chose to stay in India for their undergraduate degree in 2025, up from 47% a year earlier, while the share going overseas slipped from 42% to 40%. The Cambridge Destination Survey, which polled 404 schools across 49 countries including 112 in India, calls this a structural shift rather than a reaction to visa headlines. Its reading is that families are not giving up on an international degree, they are moving it to the postgraduate stage where the payoff is easier to judge.

• The next wave of large-scale job creation in India will come from health and education, former NITI Aayog chief executive Amitabh Kant said in Bengaluru, arguing the harder problem is building commercially viable rural entrepreneurship rather than waiting for urbanisation to absorb people. He was speaking at the launch of Next Bharat Ventures’ impact report, as the firm readies a ₹2,000 crore second fund backed by five Japanese investors.

Opinions

• Undergraduate enrolment in India fell for the first time since 2011, and Maharashtra, one of the most industrially advanced states in the country, lost nearly 200,000 students in a single year. The obvious explanation is that young people switched to short skill courses, except the same government data shows they did not. Milind Murugkar argues the families walking away are doing perfectly rational arithmetic, then asks what made it rational, and his answer is uncomfortable for anyone running a university. Read it before you next argue that India’s problem is enrolment.

• Every education ministry now wants AI, and almost none of them can answer what it costs to keep running. Two World Bank specialists take apart why the old way of budgeting for edtech breaks down when the bill arrives as usage rather than as hardware. A useful read for anyone signing a pilot this year that someone else has to pay for in three.

• Before Coursera, before edX, before the word MOOC existed, seven IITs and IISc were already putting their lectures online. India Today goes back to how that 2003 experiment turned into 819 million YouTube views and more than 54,000 hours of recorded teaching. Worth reading for the uncomfortable question underneath it, about how little credit India gives the public institutions it likes to criticise.

Note: Article URLs are occasionally modified by news agencies and may result in 404 errors. Searching the summary text should help locate the related story.