When the ancient universities of Nalanda and Takshashila drew scholars from across Asia and the Mediterranean world, India occupied the apex of global intellectual life. For most of the modern era, however, the country has been characterised as an exporter of talent rather than a receiver of it. In 2024, more than 1.335 million Indian students were enrolled abroad, collectively spending an estimated USD 47 billion on overseas education in 2022 alone — a figure projected to reach USD 70 billion by 2025.1 Yet this narrative is beginning, quietly but consequentially, to change. A confluence of global restrictions, rising costs, deliberate policy investment, and a measurable shift in how India is perceived abroad is repositioning the country within the international student mobility ecosystem.
Global Push Factors: Why the Big Four Are Losing Ground
The tightening of immigration policy across the Big Four Anglophone destinations — Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States — has been the single most consequential structural shift in global student mobility in recent years. Canada saw study permit approvals for Indian applicants fall by over 93 per cent between the first eight months of 2023 and the same period in 2025, with rejection rates rising to 71 per cent.2 Australia raised its student visa fee from AUD 710 to AUD 2,000 in July 2025.3 In the United States, the suspension of Fulbright Scholarship disbursements and the pausing of visa interview slots under the Trump administration compounded the uncertainty.4 For students from Nepal, Bangladesh, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East, India — offering internationally recognised degrees in medicine, engineering, and business at a fraction of Western cost — is increasingly the logical alternative. At AIIMS New Delhi, MBBS education is available at total course fees as low as INR 5,356, a figure that reflects extraordinary public subsidy and renders India uniquely competitive for students pursuing medical careers.5
India’s Policy Architecture for Internationalisation
India’s growing attractiveness is not merely reactive. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 provides the foundational architecture for internationalisation: it enables the top 100 globally ranked foreign universities to establish fully autonomous branch campuses in India, permits Indian institutions to offer dual and joint degrees with international partners, and integrates Indian Knowledge Systems with contemporary academic practice.6 By aligning Indian pedagogical norms more closely with international standards, the NEP makes Indian degrees more legible and credible to foreign students and prospective employers.7
The Study in India programme reinforces this ambition across more than 600 institutions, providing financial support through the PRAGATII scholarship scheme. University Grants Commission (UGC) regulations of 2023 further permit foreign universities ranked in the global top 500 to establish independent campuses in India. In October 2025, nine British universities received approval to open Indian campuses under the India–UK Vision 2035 framework.8 Simultaneously, IIT Madras has established a campus in Zanzibar, IIT Delhi in Abu Dhabi, and IIM Ahmedabad in Dubai — a bidirectional internationalisation that raises the reputational profile of Indian higher education globally and signals credibility to prospective inbound students.
Scholarships, Immersion Programmes, and Changing Perceptions
One of the least-examined drivers of India’s inbound student growth is the active role of government cultural and research bodies in funding international student mobility. The Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) administers over 3,500 scholarships annually to students from more than 160 countries, with dedicated quotas for ASEAN nations, East Asian partners, and African countries under bilateral cultural agreements.9 These scholarships, covering tuition and living costs, have been instrumental in drawing students from Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, and across sub-Saharan Africa to Indian universities — cohorts that might otherwise have looked exclusively to Chinese or Western institutions.
The Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) complements this through bilateral research fellowship schemes with counterpart institutions in Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, and multiple African nations, funding short-term academic exchanges and collaborative research visits that build durable scholarly networks between India and the Global South.10 Under India–Africa Forum Summit commitments, India has pledged thousands of educational scholarships to African students, and the uptake from countries including Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Tanzania has grown steadily as India’s reputation for quality medical and technical education has spread.11
Alongside scholarship support, structured immersion programmes have emerged as a significant mechanism for deepening international engagement. Universities including CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru, and institutions affiliated with Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Delhi have established short-term credit-bearing immersion programmes designed for foreign students, combining academic instruction with cultural visits, language exposure, and community engagement. Partnerships with universities in Hanoi, Seoul, and Nairobi have seen delegations visit Indian campuses for intensive one- to two-week programmes covering areas ranging from Indian foreign policy and development studies to classical arts and traditional knowledge systems.12
These programmes matter not merely for their immediate educational value but for the perception-shift they generate. Students who spend time in India return with a far more nuanced and favourable view of the country than one formed through media representations or geopolitical assumptions. India’s image internationally has historically been shadowed by associations with poverty, bureaucratic complexity, and infrastructure deficit. The lived experience of a well-organised university campus in Bengaluru or Pune — with its vibrant student life, English-medium instruction, modern facilities, and culturally rich environment — challenges these assumptions directly.13
This shift in perception is increasingly documented. Survey data from East Asian students who have participated in ICCR-funded exchanges or university-to-university immersion programmes consistently record higher levels of favourable sentiment towards India after their visits, along with greater likelihood of considering India for postgraduate study or professional collaboration.14
Soft Power, Civilisational Depth, and Demographic Vitality
India’s attractiveness as a study destination cannot be separated from its civilisational soft power. Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power — a country’s ability to attract and co-opt rather than coerce — applies with particular force to India.15 India’s ancient intellectual heritage, its traditions of yoga and Ayurveda, its vibrant democracy, its Bollywood cultural exports, and its extraordinary linguistic and ecological diversity constitute a value proposition that no other country can replicate. As Kadira Pethiyagoda has observed, India’s soft power is rooted in a cultural depth that predates the modern state system and resonates across Asia and Africa in ways that the cultural exports of Western nations do not.16
Demographically, India offers something singular. With 52 per cent of its population under 30 and an average national age of 28.4 years, international students who study in India are immersed in one of the world’s youngest, most entrepreneurially active societies.17 India’s strategic importance — as the world’s most populous country, fifth-largest economy, and an influential actor in the G20, BRICS, the UN, and the Quad — makes it an unparalleled living laboratory for students of international relations, development, and the social sciences. Studying in India is not merely affordable; for many disciplines, it is academically essential.
Challenges That Must Be Addressed
Significant challenges temper this optimism. India’s higher education system encompasses 1,213 universities and 58,643 institutions, and quality varies enormously across this landscape.18 International students attracted by the reputations of IITs, IIMs, or AIIMS may encounter starkly different realities elsewhere. Faculty quality, student-to-faculty ratios, and research infrastructure remain areas of systemic underinvestment outside the premier tier, and the implementation of NEP 2020 has faced delays around academic autonomy guarantees for incoming foreign institutions.19
International students also navigate genuine cultural and logistical barriers: perceptions of bureaucratic complexity in visa processing, campus safety concerns, and limited dedicated international student support services.20 A deeper paradox haunts the agenda: the very success of premier Indian institutions in producing globally competitive graduates feeds the outward brain drain that internationalisation seeks to reverse. The current ratio of approximately one inbound international student for every 28 Indian students departing abroad reflects a structural asymmetry that policy reform alone cannot quickly resolve.21
Conclusion
India stands at a historic inflection point. The convergence of Big Four restrictions, rising global education costs, the NEP 2020 reform agenda, ICCR and ICSSR scholarship diplomacy, structured immersion programmes, and a measurable shift in India’s international perception together create an unprecedented opportunity to build a genuine global classroom within the country’s borders. The empirical picture remains one of aspiration meeting reality: 50,000 inbound foreign students against 1.335 million outbound Indians is not yet a balance of success.22 But the direction of travel has shifted, and the analytical frameworks that have long governed the study of international student mobility — from push–pull models23 to destination-choice theory24 and the dynamics of national and global competition in higher education25 — increasingly point toward India as an emerging pole of gravity in the global system.
The evidence from students who have participated in government-initiated mobility programmes confirms that context shapes outcomes as much as intent.26 Where immersion programmes are well-designed and institutional support is adequate, international students leave India not merely with a degree but with a lasting affinity for the country — precisely the soft power dividend that scholars of India’s democratic and civilisational appeal have long argued is the country’s most distinctive global asset.27, 28
What India now requires is the institutional will to match its policy ambition: sustained investment in quality infrastructure, streamlined student support, equitable access, and a concerted effort to leverage the goodwill generated by ICCR scholars and immersion alumni as long-term ambassadors for Indian higher education. The data on Indian students seeking alternatives to the Big Four is already compelling;29 the question is whether India can translate that redirected aspiration into durable enrolment. If it can, the global classroom of the twenty-first century may yet echo, however faintly, the ancient university of Nalanda — a place where the world came to learn, and in learning, was transformed.
References:
1 NITI Aayog, Internationalisation of Higher Education in India (Government of India, 2025).
2 ICEF Monitor, ‘The Number of Indian Students Abroad Fell in 2025’ (18 December 2025).
3 The Red Pen, ‘International Universities Opening Campuses in India’ (27 April 2026).
4 WENR, ‘India’s Moment: An Examination of Student Mobility From and To a Key Player’ (25 February 2025).
5 Collegedunia, Top Colleges in India 2026: Rankings, Fees, Cutoff, Admission and Placements (2026).
6 Ministry of Education, Government of India, National Education Policy 2020 (2020).
7 N. V. Varghese and V. Mathews, Internationalisation and India’s New Education Policy (Centre for Policy Research in Higher Education, 2021).
10 Indian Council of Social Science Research, International Bilateral Exchange and Fellowship Programmes (2024). ICSSR’s bilateral research fellowship schemes operate with counterpart institutions in Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam, and multiple African countries, funding short-term academic exchanges and collaborative research visits.
11 Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, India–Africa Forum Summit Education Commitments (2015, renewed 2023); see also Soft Power Survey, Portland Communications and USC Centre on Public Diplomacy, The Soft Power 30 (2023).
12 Global Governance Initiative, Internationalisation of Higher Education in India 2021 (2021).
13 Kadira Pethiyagoda, ‘India’s Soft Power Advantage’, The Brookings Institution (2018).
15 Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (PublicAffairs, 2004).
17 Drishti IAS, ‘Promoting Foreign Universities in India’ (2025).
23 Everett S. Lee, ‘A Theory of Migration’, Demography, 3(1) (1966), pp. 47–57.
24 Tim Mazzarol and Geoffrey N. Soutar, ‘“Push–Pull” Factors Influencing International Student Destination Choice’, International Journal of Educational Management, 16(2) (2002), pp. 82–90.
25 Simon Marginson, ‘Dynamics of National and Global Competition in Higher Education’, Higher Education, 52(1) (2006), pp. 1–39.
26 Laura W. Perna et al., ‘Set Up to Fail? A Case Analysis of Contextual Influences on the Implementation of a Government-Initiated Student Mobility Program’, Higher Education, 68(4) (2014), pp. 607–624.
27Christian Wagner, ‘The Democratic Indian Soft Power’, South Asian Survey, 17(1) (2010), pp. 31–47.
28 Sreeram Chaulia, International Organisations and Civilian Protection: Power, Ideas and Humanitarian Aid in Conflict Zones (I.B. Tauris, 2011).
29 ApplyBoard, More Indian International Students Choosing Alternative Study Destinations Than Ever Before (2025), available at https://www.applyboard.com/applyinsights-article/indian-students-2024.
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