INDIA MAY WAIVE FEES TO ATTRACT FOREIGN STUDENTS

▶ Plan is to raise number of overseas students in higher education to 200,000 by 2023 in display of soft power

India plans to attract hundreds of thousands of foreign students to its best universities, hoping to recapture its ancient glory as a centre of scholarship.

The government is promising to waive or discount fees and to expedite visas under a programme called Study in India to be marketed to 30 countries – including the UAE – across the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe.

At the programme’s launch on Thursday, Sushma Swaraj, the foreign minister, referred to the ancient Indian universities of Nalanda and Takshila, which had attracted scholars from around the world before falling into ruin.

“The quest for knowledge has always been fundamental to India’s culture and civilisation,” Ms Swaraj said. “We can rightly say that India is one of the very few places in the world where ancient traditions and modernity coexist in harmony.”

In the first year of the programme, beginning in autumn, about 15,000 places across 160 public and private institutions will be set aside for foreign students. It is hoped to increase this to 200,000 by 2023.

Ministers did not specify whether these places would be taken from existing capacity, or whether they would be added.

India hosts about 45,000 international students – 1 per cent of the world’s population of students who move overseas for higher education. It has about 40,000 colleges and 800 universities, according to government statistics.

“The number of students coming to India for higher studies had stagnated and more students were going to countries such as Singapore and Australia,” said Prakash Javadekar, minister for human resource development.

Apart from the UAE, Study in India will target “partner countries” such as Nepal, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt and Rwanda.

Meeta Sengupta, founder of the Centre for Education Strategy think tank in New Delhi, said Study for India was a “winwin” proposition. For students from many of these countries, which have emerging economies, their higher education needs “are not met by traditional first-world systems”.

Either fees in western universities are too high, visas too difficult to get or the admission process too competitive – issues that Ms Sengupta said they would not face in India.

Through Study in India, foreign students will have access to a range of institutions, from smaller private colleges that offer diplomas to large universities offering undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral degrees. The list includes the Indian Institutes of Technology, the 23 universities devoted to scientific research that Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister, described as “the temples of modern India”.

The budget for the first two years of the programme is 1.5 billion rupees (Dh83.2 million), which will be used for promotion and to subsidise fees.

About 55 per cent of the 15,000 places offered in the first year will be eligible for partial or complete fee waivers.

The waivers suggest that the government regards Study in India not as a money-spinner but as an instrument of soft power that will raise the country’s international profile.

At the moment, having few international students on Indian campuses shuts down avenues for cultural interactions, said S S Mantha, a former chairman of the All India Council for Technical Education, a government-appointed advisory body.

Study in India is “a good move to start with”, Mr Mantha said, but Indian institutes “will have to do much more with their infrastructure and facilities”.

While India’s best universities, such as the IITs, foresee a scramble for places, there are also thousands of lower-quality colleges and universities where staff are poorly trained and facilities inadequate.

Getting faculty of equal calibre to western universities is very important, he said. “This happens now in some small pockets of excellence but it remains there. It doesn’t move around to other institutions.”

The decision to admit thousands of foreign students “may seem to be taking away seats from local students”, Ms Sengupta said. “But the university sector has shown its ability to grow in the past 4 or 5 years.”

India has added about 130 universities and 3,000 colleges since 2014, and about 34.6 million Indians are enrolled in higher education institutes,

Mr Mantha said “the expanse of education is so huge in India” that an extra 200,000 foreign students “will hardly make a difference”.

“But the value those numbers will bring, in terms of ideas and cultural exchanges, will be far higher.”

Beginning in autumn, about 15,000 places across 160 institutions will be set aside for foreign students