Dr Manasvi M Kamat
Providing a safe and secure environment to foreign students is a must, was the message at the conference titled ‘Being an International Student in India: Opportunities and Challenges’ hosted by the Goa University and supported by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations very recently. With almost all State governments making ardent efforts to reach out to maximum potential students from foreign countries to choose India as their study destination, the country doing consistently well each consecutive year.
What could help India to be one of the important study destinations is our rich diversity, our cultural ethos and the spirit of resilience. International students find the cost of living and educating in India cheap and the quality of education good compared to many places. The number of such students in the not only brings valuable foreign exchange, higher fees to the institutions but also adds heterogeneity to the campuses.
Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat are gearing up for competition to attract more foreign students while the cities like Bangalore, Pune, Ahmedabad, Vellore and Chennai are becoming ‘hotspots’ for international students for quality education and diversity of educational programmes.
Currently, 15 popular programmes in India have more than 1,000 foreign students contributing close to 80 per cent of foreign students. The latest AISHE survey reveals that the BTech programme has an enrolment of 8,861 foreign students, followed by BBA (3,354 students), BSc (3,320) while the BA has around 2,226 students. At the PhD level, there were 1,560 students, out of which 76.6 per cent are males.
Most of the progressive State governments in the country are putting in ardent efforts to increase the geographical diversity on campuses by attracting overseas students. Among others, the southern state of Karnataka leads with a maximum of 12,040 foreign students accounting to nearly one-third of the total foreign student population in India. A growing number of students from the Middle East and African countries flock to Karnataka mainly to pursue studies in medicine and engineering. It also has the highest enrolment coming from Malaysia. The cities of Bengaluru, Mysore and Manipal are the most popular destination cities for foreign students from nearly 65 countries. The Bangalore University, VTU, Mysore University and MAHE are the hotspots with as many as 2500 foreign students enrolled for their full-time courses. In addition, around 500 students join under various exchange programmes at MAHE. Karnataka now wishes to set up a centralised help centre to assist foreign students featuring a toll-free helpline managed by trained executives to attend calls and address glitching issues.
The second State that is attracting foreign students is Maharastra. It is home to 4,306 international students with Pune and Mumbai being the top destinations offering high-quality education coupled with the vibrant culture of these cities. Pune among others for long has been playing a pivotal role with a number of quality academic and research institutes, pleasant weather and good facilities. The Pune University, Symbiosis University, Bharati Vidyapeeth and the University of Mumbai attract a large number of foreign students.
Tamil Nadu is currently seeing a surge in the influx of foreign students in the past few years, thanks to its focus on quality institutions and aggressive promotional activity by its top private universities. With 3,542 students, Tamil Nadu has the third-highest number of foreign students. The VIT University, Amrita Vidyapeetham, SRM Institute of Science and Technology and the Anna University are well-know for popular choices for medicine courses, commerce and science studies. Among the above institutions, the VIT Vellore again has more than 1400 international students from 53 countries including the African continent, South East and SSARC nations with popular choices related to Computer Science and Civil Engineering.
Delhi also continues to be an important destination for foreign students, with the University of Delhi alone admitting over 2,000 students from close to 70 countries. There are a couple of other universities in the National Capital Region (NCR) which have also been able to attract foreign students. Students from Africa, neighbouring nations like Nepal, Bhutan and SAARC countries also opt for professional courses. The institutions that have cemented NCR’s position as an international student city are the South Asian University, along with Amity University, University of Delhi, with subjects like Science, Economics, English, History, Mathematics and Geography being their favourites.
Andhra Pradesh and Telangana are the two other states which have been attracting a good number of foreign students. Telangana is slightly ahead with 2,877 international students while AP has 2,092 in the last year. Before its bifurcation, AP was not only the state sending the highest number of students abroad but was also attracting a large number of foreign students in institutions like that of the Osmania University, Andhra University and the Kakatiya University. Around 2,500 students are enrolled in Osmania University and its affiliated colleges with a sizeable number of students from the Middle East, Africa, East Asian countries and from China. Osmania runs a special MBA batch only for foreign students and there is a very high demand for this course. The batch size is only 60 but it receives over 200 applications every year.
The government of Gujarat too is making stupendous efforts to transform the State into an education hub as part of Study in India campaign. This State has set itself a target of admitting over 10,000 foreign students by 2022.
The success of implementing ‘Study in India Programme’ in addition to the efforts of the States would also rest on cutting down the complex procedures and issues relating to inadequate infrastructure and lack of coordination between various agencies. Students that attended the conference at Goa University greatly acknowledge that studying in Goa has certainly added to the richness of their experience and the State has the potential to be the best place in India for education.
