Rules ready for foreign varsity campuses

Students going abroad for higher studies may soon be able to opt for courses offered by top 400 foreign universities in their campuses in India under rules framed by the University Grants Commission.

The foreign universities coming to India will have to set up Section 25 companies to offer courses in India. A Section 25 firm is a not-for-profit institution that can generate surplus but must plough it back.

They will have to offer programmes or courses comparable in quality to those offered to students on their main campuses in their countries. Before being notified as a foreign education provider, each such institution will be required to maintain a corpus of not less than Rs 25 crore.

The degrees awarded by these institutions would be treated as foreign degrees, subject to equivalence accorded by the Association of Indian Universities for further studies or government jobs. With the Foreign Education Providers Bill stuck in Parliament since 2010 for lack of consensus among parties, the government is taking the executive route to welcome the foreign institutions.

According to Human Resources Development Minister M M Pallam Raju, the UGC rules to set up the institutions are ready and they will be notified soon. The foreign institutions intending to apply under the proposed rules must be not-for-profit legal entities that have been in existence for at least 20 years in their country and registered by an accrediting agency of the country concerned or by an internationally accepted system of accreditation.

The rules also include clauses for penalties ranging from Rs 50 lakh to Rs 1 crore for violating any of the provisions or the UGC Act, besides forfeiture of the corpus.

N.R. Madhava Menon, founder-director, National Law University, Bangalore, said the UGC regulations could attract foreign institutions that want to expand operations but doubted if top universities like Harvard, Yale or Cambridge would set up campuses in India.