In FY26, a Pune-based company watched its revenue fall 27%.
And then reported the biggest profit in its 25-year history. Profit after tax nearly doubled — from ₹32.05 crore to ₹60.73 crore.
Meet Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Limited, or MKCL. You've probably never heard of it. But if you grew up in Maharashtra, there's a fair chance you or someone in your family has an MS-CIT certificate.
Here's how it works.
MKCL was set up in 2001 to fix a simple problem — Maharashtra had plenty of graduates who couldn't use a computer.
Twenty-five years later, it's an odd hybrid. The Government of Maharashtra owns 37.13% and ten state universities own another 33.91%. But MKCL gets no grants, no aid and no contracts handed to it. It has to win business like anyone else.
And it does that without owning a single classroom.
It owns the software. SOLAR tracks every learner, centre and rupee. ERA is the learning platform. Add ExamLive, LearnLive, Digital University and a stack of written playbooks for running centres.
Partners own the rooms. 6,300+ Authorized Learning Centres across Maharashtra, with 75,000+ computers, all run by local entrepreneurs. Another 3,700+ centres in other states.
Cash comes first. A learner walks in, pays upfront, gets a login. The fee is non-refundable and revenue is booked the moment the login is issued.
Then it's split. MKCL keeps a share, the centre keeps a share.
No rent. No teachers on payroll. Just 300-odd people in Pune and some software.
Segment | FY26 (₹ cr) | FY25 (₹ cr) | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| ALC Network (Maharashtra) | 152.15 | 218.57 | 75.5% |
| Nationwide programmes | 34.73 | 44.06 | 17.2% |
| Higher Education | 8.91 | 10.70 | 4.4% |
| eGovernance, iLike, International | 5.68 | 2.73 | 2.9% |
| Total | 201.47 | 276.06 | 100% |
Go one level deeper and the picture gets uncomfortable:
Product | FY26 (₹ cr) | % of revenue |
|---|---|---|
| MS-CIT | 105.96 | 52.6% |
| SARTHI CSMS-DEEP Diploma | 34.95 | 17.3% |
| Bihar Skill Development Mission | 30.31 | 15.0% |
| Everything else | 30.25 | 15.1% |
Three products. 85% of the company.
All three stumbled in the same year.
MS-CIT lost 90,276 learners, down to 7.08 lakh. That's ~₹13.9 crore gone.
SARTHI pulled the plug. The client asked MKCL to finish pending modules and stop new admissions. Completed modules fell from 1.27 lakh to 53,050. Cost: ~₹50.6 crore.
Bihar shrank by 1.4 lakh learners. Cost: ~₹11.2 crore.
Roughly ₹75 crore, wiped out.
Because most of MKCL's costs aren't fixed. They're a share of something.
Cost head | FY26 (₹ cr) | FY25 (₹ cr) |
|---|---|---|
| Paid out to centres | 46.09 | 89.43 |
| Salaries | 40.19 | 36.48 |
| Exam fees | 25.49 | 22.08 |
| Incentives to centres | 0.01 | 11.68 |
| Everything else | 57.71 | 76.31 |
| Total | 169.49 | 235.98 |
When volumes fell, the biggest cost — money paid to centres — fell almost in half. MKCL also scrapped three centre incentive schemes, cutting another ₹11.67 crore.
Revenue fell 27%. Costs fell 28%.
There was one more thing. FY25 carried a one-off ₹46.15 crore GST payment. FY26 carried none.
Consolidated P&L | FY26 (₹ cr) | FY25 (₹ cr) |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue from operations | 201.47 | 276.06 |
| Other income | 41.19 | 43.65 |
| Total expenses | 169.49 | 235.98 |
| One-off GST payment | — | 46.15 |
| Profit before tax | 73.17 | 37.57 |
| Profit after tax | 60.73 | 32.05 |
| EPS (₹) | 75.16 | 39.66 |
Look at that "other income" line — ₹41.19 crore.
Take it out, and MKCL's actual operating profit is about ₹32 crore. The company earned more from interest and investments than from teaching people to use computers.
Where's it coming from? A ₹646 crore pile of mutual funds, bonds and bank deposits — about 83% of the entire balance sheet. Fixed assets? Just ₹34.90 crore.
Three reasons it got this big:
Learners pay upfront and non-refundably. Cash arrives before the service does.
The business needs almost no capital. Partners fund the classrooms.
The dividend is tiny. ₹1.50 a share for FY26 works out to ₹1.21 crore — about 2% of profit.
Do that for 25 years and you end up with a skilling company sitting on an investment portfolio bigger than its revenue.
One product carries everything. MS-CIT is 53% of revenue and it's shrinking. There's no second act of that size yet.
Government clients can vanish overnight. SARTHI proved it. One instruction, ₹50 crore gone.
Higher Education is loss-making, at −₹2.63 crore this year.
Profit quality is soft. Over half of pre-tax profit isn't from operations. And ₹10.06 crore of "other income" is just old provisions reversed on paper.
The GST fight is open. Tax officers say MKCL's courses aren't legally recognised and it isn't an educational institution, so the exemption doesn't apply.
That last one is the big one. ₹131.39 crore of GST, interest and penalty is disputed for FY21–FY25 — more than twice this year's profit. MKCL lost its first appeal, paid ₹17.70 crore in deposits, and has gone to the GST Appellate Tribunal. Meanwhile it started charging GST from the July 2025 batch anyway.
For a company whose pitch is affordable education, that raises an awkward question: if the exemption goes, who pays — the learner, or the margin?
It's the obvious question. MKCL sells a course that teaches people to use computers. AI is getting very good at teaching people to use computers.
The company clearly knows. Read the report and the word "AI" is everywhere — it has rewritten its own mission from bridging the "digital divide" to bridging the "digital divide and the AI divide." In practice that means:
125 AI tools added to the MS-CIT syllabus
KRANTI, a family of multilingual chatbots — one counsels prospective learners, one answers doubts inside the course, one helps write code, one fixes faults on centre computers remotely
285 AI-powered eLearning courses under the KLiC and DEEP brands
Vaikhari, a voice-cloning tool for building course content faster
So AI is being bolted on. The question is whether that's enough.
The case for: every time technology moves, the floor of "digital literacy" moves with it, and a fresh batch of people falls below it. MS-CIT has already survived Windows 98, the internet, smartphones and the cloud. It isn't really a syllabus — it's a 25-year-old brand that 1.77 crore people have on their CVs. The report even notes that women list MS-CIT on matrimonial profiles. That's a signalling business, not a teaching business. And signals don't get disrupted by better teaching.
The case against: a free chatbot that speaks Marathi does a lot of what a ₹1,500 self-paced course does. More importantly, MKCL's entire machine is built around a person physically walking into a centre. If learning moves to the phone, it gets very hard to justify paying the centre its cut — and that centre network is the company. Nearly half of every rupee MKCL collects goes to keeping it alive.
The honest answer: yes, for a while. Because the buyer isn't really the learner. It's the state government funding the scheme and the employer recognising the certificate. Those relationships aren't going anywhere soon.
But the warning light is already on. MS-CIT enrolments fell 90,000 this year, and adding AI tools to the syllabus doesn't fix that. What MKCL needs isn't a chatbot inside MS-CIT. It needs a product that's as big as MS-CIT.
MKCL is really two businesses.
One is a clever, asset-light skilling franchise. Write the software, licence it out, let local entrepreneurs run the classrooms, take a cut of every login. It has trained 1.77 crore people on MS-CIT alone.
The other is a ₹646 crore investment pile quietly compounding in the background, built from 25 years of profits that were never paid out.
In a good year, nobody notices the second one. In FY26 — when revenue fell a quarter — it's the reason profit went up instead of down.
That's a nice cushion to have. It's also the kind of cushion that makes it very easy to put off finding the next MS-CIT.
Until next time.