India is excelling as a global player in several industries and areas, one of them is definitely, education.
“As many as 37500 Indian students received study visas in the UK in 2019 which was only 20,000 in 2018. As many as 37,500 Tier IV (study) visas were granted to Indian students in 2019, which is a 93% increase since 2018 when only 20,000 visas were granted,” TOI reported in 2020.
As the UK continues to be a popular destination for Indian students to study abroad, Asian Voice reached out to academicians and the current batch of Indian students in the UK to know their perspective about India’s position as a global player in education.
Professor Mukulika Banerjee, Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology at London School of Economics and Political Science said, “Higher education is a powerful means of soft diplomacy in UK-India ties. The UK boasts some of the best universities in the world and with recent changes in visa rules, Indian students find it an enormously attractive destination for higher education studies. The numbers will only grow. India has introduced a New Education Policy that welcomes foreign universities to set up campuses in India. But any foreign university has to note that academic freedom in India is far from what they might expect in an officially democratic country. Critical thinking especially in the social sciences and humanities are under serious check. A new guideline this month, requires all public universities and organisations in India to get security clearance for all international speakers, even for online events. India-UK ties in higher education, at least in India, are therefore likely to be dominated by the STEM subjects.”
Pratinav Anil, a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, works on Muslim politics in postcolonial India told Asian Voice, “Much of the general optimism around Indo-British relations after Brexit—witness comments by politicians in both countries; the conservative press; big business; think tanks; chambers of commerce—turns on the question of migration, for long a sore point. For Indian white-collar workers and students in Britain, in particular, the immigration regime before Brexit appeared rigged against them: free movement for EU nationals but an unforgiving points-based system for them that excluded all but those in the highest paid professions. Not anymore. But more so than Brexit, it is the Johnson government that has brought about this change. For while it has been happy to scapegoat and dehumanise the largely lower and middle class migrants escaping war and poverty in Africa and the Middle East, it has nevertheless courted skilled—that is, Anglophone, educated, upper-middle class—migration from South and East Asia and beyond. Here, Johnson’s break with May is clear. Gone are the days of bringing net migration ‘to the tens of thousands’. After a sharp fall under May, net migration has increased from 249,000 to 313,000 in the three years to March 2020. In the same period, the number of Indian nationals on study visas in Britain has increased from 16,000 to 51,000.”
