Attracted by its enormous youth population and growing middle class, major international study destinations are flocking to make deals in India, as the country’s National Educational Policy (NEP) pays dividends.
Sector leaders shared how their countries are investing in India during a panel discussion at The PIE Live India in Delhi last week. Vik Singh, Austrade’s trade and investment commissioner for South Asia, said India was now “the belle of the ball” for foreign institutions looking to expand with TNE opportunities.
Comparing India with Malaysia – which has long been a hub of TNE activity – the way the market was “20 years ago”, he noted that the NEP had been the “catalyst” for driving Australia’s Indian educational partnerships, which he said now number 450.
As India becomes a South Asian regional hub for Australian international education, Singh observed that the country’s institutions “are well aware of the opportunities and the choices they have in front of them”.
The British Council’s director of education for India, Rittika Chanda Parruck, said that while “all the world’s excited to partner with India”, the country is also hard at work “prepping itself to become ready to partner” with foreign institutions.
She added that around a dozen top universities in the UK are actively considering opening branch campuses in India – although she conceded that it was possible that not all of them would “reach the endpoint” with their plans.
“Our efforts have been around helping and supporting Indian universities to understand UK universities’ internationalisation journey,” she said. “Sharing information and supporting and exchanging ideas with the newly appointed or, in some cases, more experienced international offices of these universities that are going to actually set in motion the internationalisation agendas in the universities.”
All the world’s excited to partner with India
Rittika Chanda Parruck, British Council India
Her comments follow announcements from a number of UK universities about their plans to open branch campuses in India.
The University of Southampton was the first, revealing in December that it will open a campus near Delhi this summer. It exclusively told The PIE News last week that it has received over 300 applications to date – with some interest from international students.
The University of Surrey and Queens University Belfast have also thrown their hats into the ring, with plans to set up in GIFT City, while the University of Coventry is also expected to set up an Indian campus in the future and the University of Newcastle has revealed it is “seriously considering” following suit.
Tracey Marenghi, head of brand and marketing at Universities Wales, revealed that Wales was home to 28,000 Indian students in 2022/23. “There’s a lot of openness to show them somewhere different, easy to reach, more affordable but that still has those high quality universities,” she told delegates.
But there are also around 33,000 Indian TNE students enrolled in Welsh institutions in India, she said, meaning that “it’s more than physical students coming in”.
Meanwhile, at The PIE Live India, François Thérin, deputy vice-chancellor (research and enterprise) at the University of Cyberjaya in Malaysia, told delegates that Indian exchange students are starting to come to his institution. He remarked that this was an “interesting movement because [previously] there was not that much south-to-south student exchange”.
“We had Indian students studying in Malaysia but exchange is something new, definitely,” he added.
Malaysian institutional collaboration with India is becoming “broader and broader”, Thérin said, adding that as time goes on “there is more added value”.
