India’s higher education system is the 3rd largest in the world with a capacity of over 20 million students. However, India is home to just 1% of global student mobility
Dr Manasvi M. Kamat
The Finance Minister during her Union Budget speech said that the government intends to officially launch the ‘Study in India’ (SII) program to ‘encourage foreign students to study in Indian universities to turn our country into an education hub for foreign students’.
The SII programme is similar to the initiative launched by Australia, Malaysia, Singapore and Canada for boosting the country’s share of international students in the country. SII now targets to encourage more foreign students from select 30 plus countries across South-East Asia, Middle East and Africa to choose India as destination for higher education with an aim to double India’s market share of global education exports from less than 1 percent to 2 percent thereby help to improve global ranking of Indian educational institutes. This programme expects to draw more foreign students to India by projecting 160 premier universities and institutes, including IITs and IIMs, as the ideal destination for higher education. India is currently looking at international students as a source of extending India’s soft power overseas and becoming brand ambassadors for our country in their home counties.
India’s system of higher education is the third largest in the world and a capacity of enrolling more than a whopping 20 million students. However India is home to less than 50,000 international students from 166 countries accounting for just 1 percent of the global student mobility. Out of the above significant number of foreign students (around 25 percent) come from Nepal, 10 percent from Afghanistan, 5 percent from Ghana and 4 percent each from Nigeria and Bhutan respectively.
In comparison to the figures above, as many as 3,05,970 students pursue courses in foreign countries as per the UNESCO as in March 2019 while according to the Reserve Bank of India, Indian students studying abroad spent $2.8 billion in 2017-1 8 on tuition and hostel fees and have spent only $479 million in the corresponding period.
This SII scheme was originally talked about in April 2018 and covered 160 private and government offering over 25000 seats. The government, at present, permits a provision of 10 per cent to 15 per cent supernumerary seats for foreign students in higher education but this provision remains largely underutilised across universities and colleges. The SII website says more than 1,500 courses are now on offer to foreign students and some even offer scholarships. It is hoped that the country will attract additional 1.5 lakh to 2 lakh international students by the year 2022 and for that purpose sanctioned a budget of Rs 150 crore for two years. This amount is expected to be used to promote India as a top destination for higher education and funnel demand in the direction of the supernumerary seats.
The government has already begun with magnanimous plan to take the SII program forward. Governmental agencies are working with the shortlisted institutions to offer more scholarships and fee waivers while our Ministry of Commerce has identified education services as having the potential to attract foreign exchange. The government has also launched social media campaigns and a centralised admission web portal has been launched to work as a single window for admission of foreign students. The response has also been encouraging with over 2,500 students already signing up for the counselling services on the portal.
The SII program will provide meritorious foreign students fee waiver and scholarship and presently target students, primarily in Asia and Africa, including Nepal, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Malaysia, Thailand, Egypt, Iran, Kuwait, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Rwanda, among others. Government plans to offer complete fee waiver to top 25 percent meritorious applicants, 50 percent fee waiver to the next 25 percent applicants and 25 waivers to the remainder foreign students. The proposed fee waiver and scholarship will be decided by institute concerned based on predefined structure. The institutes concerned will bear expenditure on fee waiver based on cross-subsidisation or through its existing funding.
The ambitious SII program is well-warranted in present times but some issues are to be addressed to help India achieve the desired results. The government has clarified that the seats for foreign students will not be allowed to exceed number of seats which are meant for Indian students in any educational institute and in any manner would not have any adverse impact on the admission of Indian students. Though this may be true the competition for limited seats in top Indian institutions is set to get aggressive with more foreign students seeking admissions. According to the QS World University Rankings 2018, of the 799 universities in the country, 20 institutions are ranked in the top 1,000, with eight institutions in the top 500 and the ratio of the number of applicants to the number of seats available in such institutions is significantly high. As such, additional seats for foreign students need to be created rather than accommodating additional students from abroad within the existing system.
The second issue which needs rethinking is that efforts to retain the Indian students plying for education abroad to get themselves educated in India would have yielded higher results than promoting foreign students to study in India. Indians move aboard for education for seeking work opportunities, to enjoy safety, have access to quality infrastructure, more study choices, practical teaching pedagogies, good faculty and consume ‘quality’ of education. If the resources are guided to address the above expectations it would prove to be more beneficial rather than assigning more seats, and benefits to foreign students.
Thirdly the government should also not lose sight of the fact that lack of higher quality teaching/learning, absence of competitive study choices, increasing reports on socially discriminative environment, lynching in the campus, and lack of grant opportunities and research dissuade international students from pursuing education in India.
Given that the issues addressed above are well attended, the Indian government’s decision to pursue the SII initiative is a welcome move and will pave a way for many economic benefits for our country.
