Vishwa Bandhu Scholarships and Fellowships to attract foreign students and faculty and loosening regulatory frameworks to allow more international campuses in India – including exploring a “campus within a campus” model – are among NITI Aayog’s policy recommendations as part of a plan to “internationalize” higher education in India. The Public Policy Expert Group also suggested the creation of an Erasmus+-like programme, an updated curriculum and an extension of the NIRF assessment criteria to achieve the goals set out in the National Education Policy 2020.
The NITI Aayog on Monday (December 22, 2025) released a report titled “Internationalization of Higher Education in India: Prospects, Potential and Policy Recommendations”, which recommended 22 such policy interventions to address the “imbalance between incoming and outgoing student mobility”. A study conducted last year noted that in 2024, for every international student who came to study in India, 28 Indian students would go abroad for higher education.
The news comes a week after the Union government introduced the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, 2025 to overhaul India’s regulatory framework for higher education, under which the proposed Standards Council (Manak Parishad) was given a specific mandate to come up with “non-binding frameworks” for the “internationalization” of higher education in the country.
The NITI Aayog report made a number of recommendations in the areas of strategy, regulation, branding, communication and outreach, and curriculum and culture. Noting that India “requires an increase in international student inflows” to become a “global destination” for higher education and research, the report also uses various forecasting methods to estimate that India could have as many as 7.89 to 11 million international students by 2047. As of 2022, India hosted nearly 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 said, adding that depending on the intensity of internationalization that takes place, the number of incoming international students could increase to 11,000 by 2047.
Some of the recommendations for internationalization in the NITI Aayog report set up the Bharat Vidya Kosh as a national research sovereign fund (proposing a corpus of US$10 billion, of which 50% can be raised from diaspora and philanthropy, while the Center matches the other 50%); the Vishwa Bandhu Scholarship to attract foreign students; the Vishwa Bandhu Scholarship to attract foreign research talent and faculty; and the establishment of Bharat ki AAN (Alumni Ambassador Network) to tap Indians from the diaspora who have studied at leading Indian universities to act as ambassadors for Indian higher education.
The policy brief prepared on the basis of this study further cites the European Erasmus+ programme, which proposes the creation of a “multilateral academic mobility framework” tailored by a specific grouping of countries such as ASEAN, BRICS, BIMSTEC, etc., which could be called the “Tagore framework”, named after the first Asian Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Tagore.
It also proposed regulatory interventions, including facilitating the entry and exit of foreign students, teaching and research talent, through initiatives such as providing fast-track tenure for foreign faculty, ensuring their salaries are competitive with international benchmarks, and creating a one-stop shop for all visa needs, bank accounts, tax identification numbers, housing allocations, etc.
Other suggested interventions included expanding the parameters used in the NIRF rankings to include sub-parameters such as “Outreach and Inclusivity” or the “Globalization and Partnerships” category to measure institutions.
Launching the report, NITI Aayog officials said the publication is the result of a year-long effort, including an online survey of 160 Indian institutions, key informant interviews with 30 institutions in 16 countries, a national workshop held at IIT Madras, and a multinational education roundtable in the UK where India was also represented.
In the course of the study, the report found that the current imbalance in the number of outbound and inbound foreign students had serious economic and geopolitical implications and found that there has been a 2,000% increase in outbound remittances under the liberalized RBI remittance scheme in the last decade.
He added that the tuition and living expenses of Indian students overseas will reach ₹6.2 crore by 2025, which is about 2% of the country’s GDP, further noting that the expenditure of Indian students on higher education abroad is estimated to be around 75% of India’s total trade deficit in the financial year 2024-25.
The report also said that the ratio of 1:28 inbound to outbound international students represents a “significant brain drain” for India and said that the “concentration” of 8.5 lakh (out of a total of 13.5 lakh) Indian students going abroad in “strategic high-income host countries” such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia represents an additional “risk to the competitive position of people in India beyond 16” India. has renounced Indian citizenship since 2011.
Survey results from the study further noted that as many as 41% of institutions surveyed in the country agreed that “limited scholarships and financial aid” was a significant challenge in attracting students to India, while about 30% of institutions said they agreed that foreign “perception of the quality of education” in India was another challenge. Other challenges faced by Indian institutes were lack of international facilities, limited program offerings, lack of international student support and concerns about cultural adaptation.
Published – 22 Dec 2025 21:41 IST
