Vishwa Bandhu scholarships and fellowships to attract foreign students and faculty, and easing regulation frameworks to enable more international campuses in India — including exploring the “campus within campus” model — are among the policy recommendations made by the NITI Aayog as part of a road map for the “internationalisation” of higher education in India. The public policy think tank has also proposed setting up an Erasmus+-like programme, updated curricula, and expanding the criteria of the NIRF rankings to achieve goals set out in the National Education Policy 2020.
The NITI Aayog on Monday (December 22, 2025) released a report titled “Internationalisation of Higher Education in India: Prospects, Potential, and Policy Recommendations”, which recommended 22 such policy interventions in order to deal with the “imbalance between inbound and outbound student mobility”. The study, conducted over the past year, noted that in 2024, for every international student who came to India to study, 28 Indian students went abroad for higher education.
This report comes a week after the Union government introduced the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, 2025, to overhaul India’s higher education regulatory framework, under which the proposed Standards Council (Manak Parishad) has been given a specific mandate to design “non-binding frameworks” for the “internationalisation” of higher education in the country.
The NITI Aayog report has made a host of recommendations in the areas of strategy, regulation, branding, communications, and outreach, and curriculum and culture. Noting that India “requires an increase in the inflow of international students” to become a “global destination” for higher education and research, the report also uses different forecasting methods to estimate that by 2047, India could have as many as 7.89 lakh to 11 lakh international students. As of 2022, India was hosting close to 47,000 international students in its higher education institutions.
Since 2001, the number of international students coming to India has increased by 518%, the report noted, adding that depending on the intensity of the internationalisation that takes place, the number of inbound foreign students can increase up to 11 lakh by 2047.
Some of the recommendations for internationalisation made in the NITI Aayog report are setting up a Bharat Vidya Kosh as a national research sovereign wealth fund (suggesting a $10 billion corpus, of which 50% can be raised from diaspora and philanthropy while the Centre matches this amount with another 50%); a Vishwa Bandhu scholarship to attract foreign students; a Vishwa Bandhu fellowship to attract foreign research talent and faculty; and the setting up of Bharat ki AAN (Alumni Ambassador Network) to leverage diaspora Indians who have studied at top India universities into acting as ambassadors for Indian higher education.
The policy brief prepared based on this study goes on to cite Europe’s Erasmus+ Programme to suggest the creation of a “multilateral academic mobility framework” tailored to specific country groupings like ASEAN, BRICS, BIMSTEC, etc., which could be called the “Tagore framework”, named after Asia’s first Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore.
It also suggested regulatory interventions, including making the entry and exit of foreign students, faculty, and research talent easier, through initiatives like providing a fast-track tenure pathway for foreign faculty, making sure their salaries are competitive with international benchmarks, and creating a single-window clearance system for all Visa needs, bank accounts, tax IDs, housing allotment, etc.
Other interventions suggested included expanding the parameters used in the NIRF rankings to have sub-parameters like “Outreach and Inclusivity” or having a “globalisation and Partnerships” category to measure institutes with.
At the launch of the report, NITI Aayog officials said that this publication was the result of efforts that have been under way for a year now, including an online survey of 160 Indian institutions, key informant interviews with 30 institutions across 16 countries, a National Workshop that was held at IIT Madras, and a Transnational Education Roundtable in the United Kingdom, where India too was represented.
In the course of the study, the report found that there were severe economic and geopolitical implications of the current imbalance in outbound and inbound international students, observing that in the last decade, there had been a 2,000% increase in outward remittances under the RBI’s liberalised remittance scheme.
It added that Indian students’ overseas tuition and living expenses were projected to reach ₹6.2 lakh crore by 2025, representing about 2% of the country’s GDP, further noting that Indian students’ expenditure on higher education abroad was estimated to be around 75% of India’s overall trade deficit in financial year 2024-25.
The report also noted that the 1:28 ratio of inbound to outbound international students represented a “significant brain drain” for India, noting that the “concentration” of 8.5 lakh (out of total 13.5 lakh) India’s outbound students in “high-income strategic host countries” such as the United States of America, United Kingdom, and Australia “risks India’s competitive positioning in the world”, further noting that over 16 lakh people had renounced Indian citizenship in since 2011.
Survey findings from the study further noted that as high as 41% of surveyed institutes in the country agreed that a significant challenge to attracting students to India was “limited scholarships and financial aid”, whereas about 30% of institutes reported agreeing that foreign “perception of education quality” in India was another challenge. Other challenges faced by Indian institutes were inadequate international facilities, limited programme offerings, insufficient international student support and cultural adaptation concerns.
Published – December 22, 2025 09:41 pm IST
