The policy of inviting foreign universities to set up their campuses in India has quite a few damaging and far-reaching aspects as well

The entry of foreign universities in India, facilitated by the UGC (Setting up and Operation of Foreign Higher Educational Institutions in India) Regulations, 2023, first proposed in the NEP, 2020, marks a significant change in the framework of higher education in India. This change is supposed to be not only a step towards integrating Indian higher education with global institutions but also an attempt to convert the country into a regional hub for higher education. 

In this context, it also needs to be remembered that one major issue that has plagued Indian higher education for long is the gross and enduring mismatch between the demand for good-quality higher education and the supply of such an education, with demand far outstripping supply. 

One solution that lakhs of students, over the years, have individually found is to seek higher education abroad through educational loans, scholarships, and family money, often supplemented by part-time jobs abroad while studying. This scenario has led to three major consequences: one, most of these students then stay back in these countries on a permanent basis, leading to the loss of their expertise to the home country; second, Indian students have now become a significant source of income for many universities in America and elsewhere—otherwise struggling with declining domestic enrolment and gradual but steady decline in public funding; and third, it causes a large-scale drain on foreign exchange reserves of the Indian government. 

The policy of inviting foreign universities to set up their campuses in India is at least a partial response to these pressures: it would enable Indian students to stay in India even as they receive ‘foreign’ education at a relatively cheaper price, save a significant amount of foreign exchange for the Indian government and yet, will help these foreign institutions to earn money through Indian students in India. 

The problem is this policy has other more damaging and far-reaching aspects as well. Let me briefly dwell on them. First, to persuade these institutions to set up their campuses in India, the UGC has announced a slew of concessions like the freedom in admission policy and no reservations, thus creating yet another tier in the higher education sector. 

Second, even as these institutions set up their campuses in India, no institution can easily replicate its entire ecosystem in terms of its values, norms and practices, academic culture, diversity, and the range of its students and faculty at another place with another set of people, even if it has the same name and even when the culture is broadly similar. When social norms and values differ widely, as surely would be the case with foreign institutions in India, this replication would remain a fantasy. 

Third, the policy confirms that the government has no interest in improving the general level of higher education in the country through strengthening public universities and colleges. Despite proclamations to the contrary by the powers-that-be, the actual budgetary support for higher education in India remains relatively low and confined to only certain categories of institutions. As a result, over the years, the proportion of students studying in private, self-financed courses and colleges has steadily increased and now accounts for almost half the students enrolled in Indian higher education institutions. 

Instead, the government is content to offer yet another option to the more privileged among Indian students . After all, given the high fee structure of these foreign institutions and the likely number of such institutions that would agree to operate in India, only a fraction of students looking for quality higher education would actually be able to access these institutions. 

There is another aspect that troubles me about the presence of foreign universities in the country. Public, state-funded universities occupy a unique place in all countries but especially in an unimaginably unequal and hierarchical society like ours. 

These institutions not only make young people experts in their areas of study, but, more importantly, these are places where the diversity of our social world is most visible among their students: rich and poor, upper castes and others from marginalised castes, metropolitan students and students from small towns and villages, and young men and women from all over interacting in public and not-so-public places as adults on a daily basis, and so on. 

Thus, public universities and colleges in India have been a site of social experimentation with one central focus: young students are forced to interact with others they would never know otherwise as their equals; they are forced to learn to reflect on and question social, economic and political biases they have grown up with. And to help them in these experiences and experiments with understanding, often, there are their teachers. 

With the increasing presence of elite, self-financed private universities, and now with the entry of foreign universities, this social experiment will no longer remain viable. In contrast, we will soon witness a deepening of fractures in higher education, where students will learn and socialise with other students, overwhelmingly from similar backgrounds, with similar prejudices and aspirations for similar lives, and with teachers who are also mostly like them. This growing isolation, segregation, and alienation among our young students can only harm us all in the long run.