Government plan to let foreign universities enter India raises concerns
The HinduPublished : Feb 09, 2023 15:16 IST If the University Grants Commission has its way, foreign universities may soon enter Indian shores. The latest draft regulations are intended to make it easier for the world’s top-ranked universities and higher education institutions to establish campuses in India that would meet the same standards as their parent institutions in their country of origin. With this, the Indian higher education system will have two distinct parts – one of which will be foreign ‘owned’ and governed almost entirely by regulations other than those the UGC enforces on Indian universities. The regulations do not seem to have any specific provision to prevent such profiteering and even repatriation of any gains from that; all that is stated is “Cross-border movement of funds and maintenance of Foreign Currency Accounts, mode of payments, remittance, repatriation, and sale of proceeds, if any, shall be as per the Foreign Exchange Management Act 1999 and its Rules.” The larger question, however, is that the regulations reflect the government’s warped higher education priorities. Indeed, creating a separate privileged tier of institutions into which foreign resources will flow and then be ‘recovered’ through fees, and to which only a handful of India’s elite may have access, will only add to the problems in Indian higher education.