Under the measures, banks were allowed to raise funds under the swap facilities for external commercial borrowings (ECBs) and overseas foreign currency borrowings (OFCBs). ECBs have moved moderately; ECB inflows rose to $1.15 billion from $1.31 billion, while OFCB inflows increased to $2.87 billion from $1.84 billion reported on July 17. Banks can raise three-year funds through ECBs or OFCBs until the end of the year.
PE Goes to School
After making inroads into healthcare, private equity players are targeting India’s schools, ploughing over $1.5 billion into the sector in the past decade.
By Alenjith K Johny & Mohit Bhalla
If you woke up in 2026 after a decade in a coma, you would be surprised by the extent to which private equity players have made inroads into India's private hospitals. Most big private hospital chains have tasted PE money at some stage. Many, like Fortis or Max Healthcare, are already owned by KKR, while Blackstone and BPEA EQT have also made significant moves into the healthcare sector.
For years, hospitals were set up as charitable trusts, where original promoters could not take profits. This created a class of capital that seeks very long-term returns. PE firms, with their large pools of capital and professional management, saw a massive opportunity.
Today, private equity players are eyeing another sector that for decades has been considered a service, not a business: private schools. Having tested the waters in the hospital sector, PE firms are now turning their attention to India's $100-billion school education market.
Why Schools?
Schools offer a business model that is attractive to PE firms for several reasons:
- Resilience: Education is often considered recession-proof. Parents are unlikely to cut back on their children's education even during economic downturns.
- Predictable Cash Flows: Once a student is enrolled, they usually stay for 10-12 years, providing a steady and predictable stream of revenue.
- Demand: There is a high and growing demand for quality education in India, especially as the middle class expands.
- Asset Ownership: Many private school chains own the land and buildings, which are valuable real estate assets.
The Structure of PE Investments
The primary challenge for PE firms in the Indian school sector is the legal requirement that schools must be run by non-profit trusts or societies. To overcome this, PE firms use a "two-tier" structure:
- The School Trust: This is the non-profit entity that holds the school's license and is responsible for its day-to-day operations and academic delivery.
- The Service Company: This is a for-profit entity, often owned or backed by PE firms. It provides various services to the school trust, such as infrastructure, management, recruitment, technology, and catering. In return, the school trust pays service fees to the service company. This allows PE firms to effectively participate in the profits of the school business while complying with the law.
Major Players and Deals
Several high-profile PE firms have already made significant investments in the Indian school sector:
- KKR: Backed Lighthouse Learning (formerly EuroKids International).
- Warburg Pincus: Invested in the school segment of Ekayana.
- Temasek: Has a stake in Global Schools Foundation.
- TPG Rise: Invested in the education platform, InCred.
Challenges and Concerns
Despite the potential for growth, there are several challenges and concerns associated with PE investment in schools:
- Regulation: The school sector is highly regulated, and any changes in government policy regarding the non-profit status of schools could impact PE investments.
- Ethics and Quality: Critics argue that the profit-motive of PE firms might lead to higher tuition fees and a compromise on the quality of education.
- Social Impact: There are concerns that the commercialization of education could further widen the gap between those who can afford quality private education and those who cannot.
The Outlook
The influx of PE capital into the Indian school sector is expected to continue, driven by the strong demand for quality education and the successful track record of PE investments in other sectors like healthcare. While the legal and ethical challenges remain, the "service company" model has provided a viable pathway for PE firms to enter this lucrative market.
Going Totally Nuts Over Coco de Mer
Travel as obsession, from dodo bones in Mauritius to giant coconuts in the Seychelles
FLYING DUTCHMAN
MICHIEL BAAS
As my partner and I are neither beach people nor enthusiastic swimmers, we find ourselves remarkably often on islands surrounded by nothing but endless ocean. We already paid the price for this once by getting stranded on New Caledonia, a French territory comprising dozens of islands in the South Pacific, during a riot, only to be evacuated two weeks later by the French Army.
So when for the second time in this column on this page two years ago, the word "vacation" was solemnly vowed to stick to megacities and mountain air, we were organically sourced single-origin coffee. By which we announced we were off to the Seychelles, eyebrows were raised. Not interested in resorts, what exactly possessed us then? The answer can be summarized in one word: coconut.
The island of Praslin is one of the few places where the 'coco de mer' still grows in the wild. Its French name translates as sea coconut, although, of course, it isn't the sea that produces them, but improbably tall palms.
The Seychelles entered the European colonial imagination surprisingly late. Portuguese sailors mapped the islands in 1502, but for centuries they remained uninhabited. Arab seafarers had long known of them, using the archipelago, much like the islands of Reunion and Bourbon, as a stepping point without ever settling there. It was only because the French formally claimed the islands in the mid-18th century that a more sedentary flora had evolved largely undisturbed for several millennia.
Curiously, coco de mer was already well known in Europe. The enormous nuts washed up on shores in the Maldives, giving rise to myths of a mysterious tree growing beneath the sea. Others carried them back to Europe, where their unmistakably female shape — somewhere between voluptuous buttocks and a vulva — fuelled endless fantasies about their origins. When explorers finally made their way to its birthplace, the myth was replaced by something even more extraordinary.
This turned out to be easier imagined than accomplished. Coco de mer is among the world's most tightly protected botanical treasures. Every nut sold legally is individually certified, and the prices are appropriately eye-watering for what is, in the end, an absurdly oversized coconut.
The seed is the largest on Earth, commonly weighing 20 kg or more. Palms take around 50 years to bear fruit, and each fruit needs another seven to ten years on the tree before it can be harvested and the nut extracted.
The joy of journeys like these lies in the obsession. Who would travel halfway around the world to gaze at the seed of a palm tree? The question answers itself. We visited every shop on Praslin that supposedly sold them before deciding that, really, a specimen could be found at a small roadside shop specializing in expensive furniture.
This is also where the palms themselves can be admired. Much like searching for dodo remains in Mauritius, which have become something of a pilgrim's quest for those like us, searching for the coco de mer in its natural habitat is an exercise in appreciating the beautifully, almost preposterously large.
Walking through Vallée de Mai, palm beside the road on our way to the beach, my partner suddenly muttered, "Remember Mauritius and the searching for dodos?" He meant Mauritius, where we searched for the biological formation of Mare aux Songes, which had once yielded the largest concentration of dodo remains. We didn't find any, but there was one to buy.
That is why we, now, in my home, have a small dodo, a wooden one, assembled from genuine bones, enough to conjure the vanished bird. It wasn't quite the same.
Nor for that matter, was our determined search for an authentic coco de mer. For days, they were impossible to find. Dodos and coconuts. I suddenly slipped and almost fell into the mud. We were left with two dodos, both with a pride of place in the living room, which ultimately resulted in a mystique. A monument to the absurd, a piece of art that once was a coconut.
Our coco de mer (pic) now radiates its peculiar mystique from our living room
How Do I Count Tourists in Goa?
As flights and hotel occupancy fail to capture the number of tourists flocking to Goa, here are some unusual indicators that also mark the changing nature of tourism—traffic jams in monsoon and Airbnb holdings.
By Vikram Doctor
You are stuck at a junction in North Goa. It’s not just the regular November-to-February season, when this used to be uncommon. No, it’s early July, and you are here, stuck in a light rain and, worse, next to a sewage tanker trailing its unmistakable odour.
The vehicles around you in all directions include many with out-of-state licence plates—KL (Kerala), MH (Maharashtra), and TG (Telangana). Among the local cars are dozens of self-drive rentals packed with tourists, all wearing clothes cut from the same cloth—group t-shirts, shorts, women’s frocks, even an old lady’s sari.
But this is the new reality of many parts of Goa just now. The monsoons used to be a time when restaurants closed and people retreated to their ancestral villages or looked for non-seasonal jobs. Goa Tourism marketed the state for years on discounted packages, trying to weather the rather cringe-inducing rainy-day tourism.
IT’S RAINING, BUT...
Monsoon tourism really seems to be taking off. The rise of a middle class in West and South India has made last-minute domestic trips an easy option. In recent years, it has been realised that the costs of closing down, like letting property decay and retraining staff, are more than what’s gained from cutting losses through the monsoons.
Much of this change isn't captured in the official statistics, which focus on flights and hotel occupancy. A recent report showed a sharp seasonal decline in air passengers to Goa in June—a 19.4% fall from the same period last year. This doesn’t take into account the large number of tourists arriving via the Konkan Railways or by bus from the west coast.
OTHER METRICS
When traditional indicators are ineffective, people start looking at other metrics. One well-known example is the Lipstick Index, introduced by the late Leonard Lauder, noting that sales of lipstick rose during economic downturns as people switched to inexpensive indulgences. Similarly, rising demand for corrugated iron boxes or grooming services can be signs of economic confidence.
BIRYANI ON THE MANDOVI
A hospitality professional says that casino boats on the Mandovi river are seeing a surge in customers from Hyderabad, and their Telugu food offerings have increased. Restaurants like House of Telugu and Mana Andhra Ruchulu are now well-represented in North Goa.
FOLLOW THE SEWAGE TANKER
Assagao, like many Goan villages, does not have sewage lines. Builders of new villas typically hire sewage tankers to suck up waste two or three times a week, depending on occupancy. Tracking the movements of these tankers is one way to track occupancy rates in short-term rental properties—it is literally data that can’t be flushed away!
CUT FROM THE SAME CLOTH
Groups of tourists wearing coordinated wear (like “Twinning is Winning” outfits) is a small but established part of mass tourism. Another indicator is the inescapable presence of paneer on menus. While Goa never featured dairy products in a major way, the prevalence of paneer signals the importance of domestic, vegetarian tourists.
GLOBAL VILLAGE
On AirDNA.co's list, 15 of the 20 most profitable short-term rental locations in India are in Goa.
- Assagao tops the list with an average monthly revenue of $1,243 and a 32.5% occupancy.
- Badem near Assagao is No. 2 with an average monthly revenue of $1,182.
- Calangute, Arpora and Anjuna also feature prominently. Airbnb’s own list gives a total of 8,761 short-term rental locations in Goa.
Can machines fill in for teachers?
AI can certainly enhance learning in classrooms, but can it connect the way a human teacher can with a student?
By Reshom Majumdar & Atanu Biswas
DATA CRUNCHER
Imagine an ordinary classroom—except for one thing: the teacher standing at the front is a robot. Every student, even the boy or girl sitting right at the back, is being observed, from their facial expressions to their heart rates. Some are worried about disappearing homework, others about a difficult chapter late at night, or felt the joy of finally understanding something that once seemed impossible.
Meet 'Emi', a highly sophisticated, AI-powered humanoid robot developed by Toronto-based Robo-Ed. She has been created to help teach coding, robotics and AI to students in elementary schools across New York state. The plan has since been expanded to include subjects like math and data collation. That pause may define what 'Emi' brings to the table. Like it or not, it is already entering our classrooms.
The debate over 'Emi', is, therefore, not just about one robot. It's about an unexpected question: what makes someone a good teacher?
For centuries, the answer seemed too obvious to ask. A teacher doesn't simply teach a subject. Every teacher walks into a classroom carrying a life—a visible scrapbook filled with old report cards, lost football matches, homework, embarrassing mistakes, small victories and, if he or she is lucky, the memory of someone who once believed in them. Every teacher was once a student. And never was. Perhaps that absence matters more than all her correct answers.
Curiously, Sally hadn't won her surprise prize: Anne Sullivan, the teacher in The Miracle Worker who finally reached Helen Keller's world. Sullivan's journey was not about getting every answer right. It was about knowing how to reach into the darkness and finally finding a way through.
The tech sounds remarkably modern. The question doesn't. Asimov once famously wrote about the future, where a child's education becomes a conversation with a machine instead of a room full of classmates. 70 years later, films like Park Joong-Eun's 2021 After Yang continue to ask a similar question: can a machine become part of our emotional lives? Or does it merely imitate them?
None of this means AI shouldn't stay. In many parts of the world, including India, it's already there in the form of coaching and test-prep apps. In many countries and geographically remote areas, there's a serious teacher shortage, especially in S&T. Teachers are often overworked, tasked with mundane administrative jobs that nobody enters the profession for. AI can certainly solve that. If AI can solve an algebra equation for the n-th time with infinite patience, and help a student after school hours, it deserves a seat in the classroom.
The difficulty is that beneficial technologies never just solve problems. They quietly change how we think about things. Give students calculators and mental arithmetic declines. Give them search engines and their memory and research skills might change. If we change how we think about teaching, will we lose something else?
Whether human teachers are replaced by AI will change how we think about those who once believed in us. Some changes warrant reconsideration. For example, a human teacher forgets. A machine usually doesn't. A wrong answer, an awkward question, or an embarrassing classroom moment has traditionally faded with time. Should every bit of data follow a student into their adult lives? Is the data the same as the student's potential?
Yet, the deepest difference between a human teacher and a machine is unmeasurable by technology. It's a memory of another kind. Years after leaving school, few of us remember the exact proof in geometry, or the date of an obscure treaty. What we remember is the teacher who waited after class because we were struggling for words. We remember the teacher who looked at a disappointing marksheet and somehow saw more potential than the numbers.
Whether AI can understand these nuances is highly unlikely. AI is already more clever than any teacher I ever had. It's more efficient, and certainly more patient. But I still hope there's someone in the front of the classroom who knows that looking out of the window instead of at the blackboard doesn't mean the homework is really a quiet cry for help. It's something AI may never quite be able to do.
Teaching, in its purest sense, isn't about data transfer. It's about a connection between two human beings. Knowledge, at its best, is one human being helping another discover what he or she can become. It's about passing on confidence, curiosity, and hope. A human teacher gives a child something no algorithm ever could—the feeling that another human being believes in them. And sometimes, that kind of lesson changes a life.
The writer is professor, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata
The Quiet Joy Of Raising Ordinary Kids
Sure, ambition matters, but not every child has to be a concert level pianist
SUNDAY ROAST
I find myself in a slightly more relaxed phase of motherhood. Both my children are now adults, with one stepping into the job market. It is, of course, not without its own stresses, but it’s now an adult stress of reflect, reassess, and indulge in a little retrospective wisdom.
Years ago, surrounded by high-achieving parents, I was convinced my kids needed to excel at piano, Olympics and Stockholm. I remember my husband and I sitting in a café, comparing our children to the unusually advanced toddlers, that our friends’ children were—a violin prodigy, a math whizz, an under-14 cricket Olympian, a Finals Medal winner. It made us feel like the only people raising an ordinary kid. Or perhaps, the optimum.
And yet, there is a quiet joy in raising exceptionally ordinary children. Maybe not prize-exceptional, but 'Ordinary-exceptional' and 'Good-child-exceptional'.
Modern childhood has a gentle way of editing our scripts. My children are exceptional, just not in the way the current world demands. They are the kind of people who search you out to wait for you and call home to tell you they missed you. For me, that’s quite an achievement.
They haven’t been to good schools, played sports, learned music, and done reasonably well at all of it. They are decent, empathetic, emotionally and logically respectable, clap-from-the-second-row performers. And that, as it turns out, is where most of life happens.
We often forget just how small the percentage is that reaches global fame, or prize-winning brilliance. Just below that sits a vast and comfortable band of people capable, and quietly successful people. The world, inconveniently, is largely run by them.
The great pressure to believe our child is simply one coaching class away from greatness. So, we stretch ourselves financially, emotionally and logistically, all in pursuit of that extra edge. One of the saddest consequences of this collective ambition is the rush to send children abroad for education, often taking financial aid, and sometimes beyond a family's means.
But we do this because we want to give them the best. And yet, the best is often complicated. Along with the benefits comes pressure, and sometimes a quiet, persistent sadness under the weight of sacrifice.
I am not against higher education or liberal immigration rules. Western countries is an easy ways to explain to parents back home, for whom the word 'abroad' still carries a measure of prestige and success.
Otherwise, these young adults study intensely and work equally hard. I see them in cafes and supermarkets, doing jobs they wouldn't even consider back home, their faces brighten momentarily when someone is kind to them, but mostly they carry the expression of an uphill struggle.
I do, however, occasionally feel a flicker of irritation. My daughter often reminds me how much she barely plays. My son, after years of cricket coaching, rarely touches the bat. I look at the small violin that says, 'After all those early mornings?'.
But perhaps the point of it wasn't the skills. Maybe our children deserve to translate into a lifelong passion or professional achievement. Rather, we build discipline, exposure, and perspective. As someone wisely said, "Your children are not your résumé".
Better to raise children who are emotionally secure, resilient, and kind than to raise ones burdened by our own unfulfilled dreams. Modern life, even in India, is already demanding enough. What we can offer is a space they can return to, regardless of how things look on a marksheet, and know they are loved for who they are, not for their successes or, even worse, for their disappointments.
If our children are allowed to become themselves. Not impressive versions. Not performative and successful models. Just people. That, surely, is the greatest success of all.
REMEMBER, MOZART DIDN'T MAKE IT TO IIT
Wait, did he?
It's best-ever games for Para athletes
Rana finishes off in style with gold
Glasgow: Indian para-shot putter Soman Rana clinched gold in the men's F57 event as he hurled his throw to a best distance of 13.40m to stand on top of the podium on Saturday. This success saw Rana bettering his previous year's performance in the Commonwealth Games.
The 28-member Indian para sports contingent ended their campaign with 3 gold, 2 silver and 2 bronze. There is no Indian event in para sports on Sunday. It is the best-ever performance for Indian para sports in the Commonwealth Games. India had won four medals in the para sports in the CWG in 2022 edition and Rana's gold helped take the total of seven medals—three gold, two silver, and two bronze.
Before Glasgow, the 2022 Birmingham Games was the most productive one for Indian para sports with Bhavina Patel and Sonalben Patel winning a gold and a bronze respectively in para table tennis. A silver, won in para table tennis in Birmingham, was later stripped of his medal after failing an in-competition dope test.
In Glasgow, para track and field athletes scooped six medals—3 gold, 2 silver, 1 bronze—while para powerlifting added the other bronze. The para athletics team also ended India's 20-year wait for a medal at the CWG. The last medal from para athletics before Glasgow came in 2002 at Manchester when para discus thrower Ranjit Kumar Jayaseelan won bronze.
India's para athletes also secured podium finishes in para track and field. This year, Dharambir (gold) and Shilpa Shya (bronze) in men's F51 club throw; and Soman Rana (gold), Mahavir Galvot (gold) and Shreyansh (silver) in men's 100m T47; and Neha (silver) in women's T57 (silver).
