A new chapter on glocal education

NEW DELHI: The government has proposed to open doors for foreign universities to partner Indian institutes through external borrowing and the foreign direct investment route, but stopped short of allowing them to set up full-fledged campuses in the country.

“We have begun drafting a scheme in line with the budget announcement. The idea is to allow institutes to raise funding from outside,” human resource development secretary Amit Khare told ET. “Under the scheme, a partnering foreign institute will be able to bring in funds and set up a centre at the Indian institute. This will lower the cost of higher education significantly,” he said.

While the budget raised the allocation for education by just 4%, there is hope offered by the decision to “enable sourcing external commercial borrowings and FDI” to help deliver higher-quality education.


Finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said this was being done as “our education system needs greater inflow of finance to attract talented teachers, innovate and build better labs”.

The move comes at a time when many Indian students are going abroad for higher studies, or to Indian private institutes that have foreign collaborations. There are already more than 340 private universities in India that could stand to gain from the opening up of the funding regime.

There is also a good financial reason to allow reasonable FDI infusion into the higher education sector to bring down education cost for the student — especially in private institutes which are drawing more students across rural-urban areas than in government-run ones.

ECBs come at an interest rate of 1-1.5% vis-à-vis around 8% for domestic funding.

According to the latest Economic Survey, absence of a suitable financial support system and high burden of course fee, especially in higher education, push out the poor and underprivileged sections out of the education system.

The budget also announced that 150 higher educational institutions would start apprenticeship-embedded degree or diploma courses by March 2021 to increase employability of fresh graduates.

It announced a full-fledged online degree-level education programme by institutions ranked within the top 100 in the National Institutional Ranking framework.

The government plans to hold an Ind-SAT exam in Asian and African countries to assess and admit foreign students into Indian institutes through a ‘Study in India’ programme.