Video Credit: Ananth Rupanagudi, IRS IRAS’97. Principal Financial Adviser, Construction, SR.
The School Bus That Costs More Than Your EMI
Over one lakh rupees a year. Just for the school bus. In Lucknow. Not Mumbai, not Bangalore. Lucknow.
The bus isn’t a Mercedes. It’s not air-conditioned. It’s the same yellow oil-guzzling Mazda that’s been ferrying kids for decades. Yet, private equity Indian schools have turned your child’s education into a Wall Street profit center. KKR, Blackstone, Apollo—names you associate with billion-dollar deals—are now in the business of your child’s school bus, uniform, and textbook. And they’re making a killing.
This isn’t about better education. It’s about extraction. While you scramble to pay 15-20% annual fee hikes, hedge funds are quietly building billion-dollar portfolios. The trick? A legal loophole so obvious, it’s hiding in plain sight. Indian law says every school must be a nonprofit. So they split the model: nonprofit on paper, profit through the back door.
This is the story of how private equity turned your middle-class dream of good education into their quarterly earnings report. We’ll name names. We’ll follow the money. And we’ll show you exactly where your one lakh rupees bus fee actually goes.
Before we begin, if you want to see how deeply we investigate stories—complete with aerial perspectives on India’s changing landscape—check out our editor’s YouTube channel, DroneMitra, for stunning drone footage that brings stories to life: https://youtube.com/@dronemitra/videos and https://www.youtube.com/@dronemitra/shorts
Now, let’s talk about what’s really happening in your child’s classroom.
The Vanishing Middle-Class Dream
When School Fees Become Hedge Fund Returns
Remember when school meant tuition, maybe some books, and a uniform? Those days are dead.
Transport. Activity fees. Technology charges. Smart class fees. Examination fees. Development fees. Infrastructure surcharge. The list grows every year. And so does the bill.
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LocalCircles, the citizen engagement platform, surveyed over 31,000 parents across India in May 2025. The results? Brutal. 81% of private schools hiked fees by at least 10% for the 2025-26 academic year. One in five schools—22% to be exact—raised fees by more than 30%. In just one year.
Step back three years. From 2022 to 2025, 44% of parents reported cumulative fee increases between 50% and 80%. That’s not inflation. That’s a money grab.
Here’s what that looks like on the ground. A family in Bengaluru pays ?2.4 lakh annually for their two kids in a mid-tier ICSE school. Transport alone: ?80,000. In Hyderabad, parents at a well-known chain school watched fees jump from ?1.1 lakh to ?1.4 lakh in two years—no new facilities, no explanation. In Delhi NCR, a parent calculated that extracurriculars now cost more than the base tuition.
The middle-class squeeze is real. Fathers take second jobs. Mothers delay career breaks. Grandparents dip into retirement savings. And still, the question lingers: Why is education getting so expensive?
The answer isn’t teacher salaries. It’s not infrastructure. It’s not even textbooks.
The answer is sitting in a boardroom in New York, calculating internal rates of return.
Private Equity Indian Schools: The Quiet Takeover
How Wall Street Bought Your Neighborhood School
You probably didn’t notice. That’s the point.
In 2019, KKR—the same firm that owns hospitals, highways, and telecom towers—spent ?1,475 crore to acquire EuroKids. Today, rebranded as Lighthouse Learning, it runs over 1,850 preschools and 60 K-12 schools. Nearly 190,000 children walk through their gates every day. That’s roughly the population of Panaji, Goa. All under one private equity umbrella.
In November 2025, KKR doubled down. According to the Economic Times, they pumped in a fresh ?6,500 crore and brought in PSP Investments, a Canadian pension fund, for an additional ?1,760 crore. KKR still holds majority control. The company now targets ?1,675-1,750 crore in revenue for FY26, with EBITDA at ?650 crore. That’s a 37% profit margin. On education.
KKR initially wanted to sell at a $1 billion valuation in 2024. They couldn’t find a buyer at that price. So they pivoted: pour in more capital, scale faster, sell bigger later. Classic private equity playbook. Your child’s classroom is now part of a “multi-year value creation strategy.”
Then there’s Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity firm. In November 2025, Economic Times reported they entered advanced talks to acquire a majority stake in Globetrotters Educational Innovations, which operates Jayshree Periwal International School (JPIS) in Jaipur and six preschools. Deal size: $150-200 million for the anchor acquisition. But Blackstone isn’t stopping there. They’re building a $600-700 million education platform. Buy one chain, bolt on more, create a portfolio, exit at scale.
Apollo Global Management took a different route. They backed Global Schools Foundation (GSF), a Singapore-based entity, which went on a buying spree in India. In April 2023, as reported by Times of India, GSF acquired Glendale Academy in Hyderabad for approximately ?400 crore. GSF plans to deploy over $550 million across Indian K-12 schools by 2026. Apollo’s fingerprints are all over the capital stack.
Let’s be clear: These aren’t education companies dabbling in finance. These are financial firms treating education as an asset class. They’re not interested in pedagogy. They’re interested in IRR—internal rate of return. And they’re getting it.
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