To Promote ‘Study In India’, First Woo Back Indian Students 

Recently, the government launched a ‘Study in India’ initiative, under which a web portal has been created to provide all relevant information to any potential foreign student. The government is offering fee waivers for many of them. This is one of the rare activities of the government, where four different ministries - Ministry of Human Resource Development, Ministry of External Affairs, Ministry of Home Affairs and Ministry of Commerce and Industry are working together.

There is a focus on 30 countries in Asia and Africa, where a lot of outreach will be attempted. All centrally funded technical institutes (CFTIs) have been told that they can have 15 per cent super-numerary seats for foreign nationals. The goal is to increase the number of foreign students in India from around 45,000 now to 2 lakh in 2023.

There is no doubt that admitting more foreign students in our universities is desirable. Diversity in the classroom is good for learning. In due course, it may become financially profitablefor our poor institutions. And, of course, it enhances soft power of the nation. But the question is whether it will work.

There have been a lot of discussions on social media as to why foreign students don't prefer India. A lot of reasons have been cited:

They don't know enough about our programmes, which universities are good, how to apply and so on. Well, if a lack of information was the primary issue, then this new initiative will certainly help. But is that one of the main reasons?

They hear biased news about the country. How women are unsafe here. How foreigners, particularly from Africa, are discriminated against, attacked, etc. All such reports are exaggerated and a wrong impression about personal security has been created. India has been portrayed as a difficult place to live in with its ‘harsh’ weather, tough to move around and difficult–to-negotiate house rentals.

Well, the new programme can do very little to correct that impression.

These issues can be endlessly debated, without, perhaps, never reaching a conclusion. But if we really want to understand why foreigners don't want to study in India, the easiest way to find out is to understand why Indians themselves don't want to study in the country. Yes, a very large number of Indians go abroad to study. And I bet they don't do so only because they think that international exposure will help their careers. (If that was all, then we should be seeing a lot of people going abroad for a semester or two.)

While we have only 45,000 foreign students in India, more than 5.5 lakh Indians are studying abroad as per a statement given out by the government at the Lok Sabha in August 2017. Instead of aiming to bring 2 lakh foreigners to Indian universities, can we set a goal to woo back 2 lakh Indian students to universities here, by 2023. I am convinced that if we are able to attract Indians to Indian universities, foreigners will start getting interested.

But, why do Indians go abroad? They do, because there aren't many good institutions in India. And therefore, those who didn't get admission to any of the few good quality institutions and could afford to study abroad, leave India. If we want to have 2 lakh foreigners, and if we assume that on an average our best institutions will have 5 per cent foreign students within the next five years, it means that we must have good institutions with 40 lakh Indian students in them. The entire Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) system has only 75,000 students (and I have no hope of the IIT system accommodating 5 per cent foreign students within five years).

And the reason for the absence of good enough institutions in India is very obvious. Quality requires resources. In India, government invests heavily only in a few institutions, and most states exercise tuition control on private universities. We must find a solution to this problem: How to provide students with weak financial background access to good quality education. Today, she has no such access, because there is no (or very little) good quality education. And our public policy has consistently preferred access over quality. Can we find a mechanism by which a poor can get access to quality. This could be by way of allowing intense tuition, but supporting financially weak students through a variety of means. For instance, the government can chip in through some schemes of scholarships for the poor, especially with banks giving easy education loans. Institutions can seek philanthropic support. It will have to be a combination of all of these. And if we can allow quality institutions to exist on Indian soil, we will not only save huge amount of foreign exchange that we spend on educating lakhs of our youth abroad, but will also be able to attract foreign students to such institutions.

And when we talk of quality of education, it is not just about attracting good faculty and building good infrastructure, but also having a good student experience. Do our campus have enough freedom?? Do academic processes have enough flexibility? And when you consider some of these issues, unfortunately even the best in India (like the IITs) do not compete well with even the ordinary outside. There are about 100,000 IIT alumni outside India. How many of them are able to convince their own sons or daughters to spend just one semester under a study abroad programme in an IIT? Certainly, in these cases, the issue is not a lack of information but actually having enough information that their alma mater does not meet the requirements of their wards.

Of course, it is not my point that the ‘Study in India’ initiative is bad. We must attract as many foreign students as we can even with the current quality of education we have. Advertising our strengths, pushing public institutions to admit more foreign students, providing tuition waivers, easing visa and other hurdles will increase that number, but to reach 2 lakh and beyond, we will need to improve the quality of our education offerings.

This article first appeared in ‘musings of dheeraj sanghi’ and has been republished here with permission.