India’s Higher-Education System Is Driving Students Out — Not Bringing The World In

India’s student mobility crisis is no longer a question of data, it is an indictment of a system that has refused to reform while the world moved on. The new NITI Aayog paper does not so much analyse this imbalance as expose it. The numbers are brutal: for every foreign student who chooses India today, 19 Indians leave the country to study abroad. In 2021, the ratio plunged to 1:24, the worst imbalance in modern Indian history. One almost doesn’t need a policy paper to understand what this means; one only needs to stand outside any VFS centre or IELTS coaching hub in the country. The NITI report simply gives shape to a reality millions of Indian families already know — the higher-education system is not good enough for their children, and the world is more than willing to absorb them.

The outbound wave is now a runaway phenomenon. India sent 1.33 million students abroad in 2024, making it the largest source of international students globally, ahead of China. This would be a source of pride in a different context. But in India’s case, the exodus highlights the opposite: people are voting with their feet against the domestic system. Meanwhile, inbound numbers — the students India supposedly wants to attract — remain frozen. India hosted just 46,878 foreign students in 2021–22, a decline from its 2019–20 peak and an embarrassing 0.10% of total enrolment. The NITI Aayog authors do not sugarcoat it. India, they say, is a “semi-peripheral host,” a polite academic phrase for a country that has aspirations but not the systems to match them.

This stagnation comes at a time when global mobility is exploding. International student numbers rose from 2.2 million in 2001 to 6.9 million in 2022, creating a booming marketplace where countries compete aggressively for talent, revenue and soft power. Almost every education economy worth its name — Canada, Australia, Germany, the UAE, South Korea, Malaysia — has strengthened its inbound play. India, with one of the largest English-medium ecosystems in the world, has somehow managed to opt out. It is hard to call this anything but a policy failure, particularly when the financial haemorrhage is added to the picture.

The NITI report estimates that Indian students spent USD 34 billion in just the U.S., Canada, UK and Australia in 2023–24, and that total overseas spending is set to reach USD 70 billion in 2025 — roughly 2% of India’s GDP, and close to 75% of the country’s annual trade deficit. The authors describe this as “a serious and structural foreign exchange leakage,” though even that feels like an understatement. Outward remittances for “studies abroad” under the RBI classification have grown 2,000% in a decade. This is less a financial story and more a political one — a system that forces millions to look outside its borders for quality higher education is a system that is, fundamentally, no longer trusted.

The reasons are not mysterious. India’s inbound experience is a catalogue of unforced errors. A foreign student first encounters a visa regime built for a different century — slow, opaque, burdened by paperwork and arbitrary clearances. The paper calls for “simplifying visa processes, reducing documentation burdens, and addressing regulatory bottlenecks” as an urgent priority, effectively stating what foreign students have complained about for years. Canada and Australia made their student visa pipelines a competitive asset decades ago. India still treats a foreign applicant as an inconvenience.

Then there is the near-total absence of national branding. India has never taken seriously the idea that education is an export — a soft-power instrument, an economic lever, a diplomatic asset. Malaysia does this. South Korea does this. China does it at a scale India doesn’t even acknowledge. Even Turkey and Uzbekistan have built targeted recruitment funnels. Meanwhile, India imagines that proximity, affordability and English will somehow do the job. The NITI paper warns that without a unified message, a clear identity and consistent visibility, India will remain invisible in the global marketplace. It calls a branding push “a sine qua non” — the language of academic diplomacy trying hard not to sound exasperated.

Suppose a student gets past the visa obstacles and finds India on their radar despite the branding vacuum. They then arrive on campuses that are often unprepared to host them. Accommodation shortages, outdated hostels, patchy international offices, weak safety systems, untrained staff and cultural alienation have quietly eroded India’s reputation as a destination. The report acknowledges this bluntly, urging investment in “hard infrastructure that meets the standards and requirements of international students” while stressing that many students “feel alienated” due to limited multicultural sensitisation. In a global market, student experience is the product. India has simply not designed it.

Academically, too, the mismatch between India’s potential and its reality is glaring. A country that can run a cost-efficient Mars mission and build one of the world’s biggest digital public goods ecosystems still struggles to internationalise its curricula, create joint degrees, build credit-transfer systems or hire foreign faculty at scale. The NITI paper argues that India must integrate its rich research ecosystem — from ISRO to biotech clusters — more meaningfully into higher education, highlighting the country’s “low-cost, high-impact research” rather than leaving it buried in bureaucratic silos. It is a strange irony that global giants like Amazon and Google see India as a top research hub, but universities abroad rarely see it as a source of cutting-edge academic collaboration.

The glaring hole, however, is the absence of post-study opportunities. This is not some exotic foreign policy idea — it is the backbone of global mobility. Canada’s Post-Graduation Work Permit, Australia’s Temporary Graduate Visa, the UK’s Graduate Route: these visa frameworks are the real engines powering their international enrolments. India, meanwhile, offers nothing. Once a foreign student graduates, the message is simple: pack your bags. The NITI report tries to nudge the system forward by proposing a two-year internship visa for the top 10% of foreign graduates and recommending policies that allow international student entrepreneurs to build companies in India. It is the kind of reform that would make India competitive overnight, but also the kind that requires political imagination and administrative courage — qualities in short supply when it comes to immigration reform in India.

To be fair, India has taken steps. NEP 2020 talks about “internationalisation at home”. The UGC has introduced twinning programmes, dual degrees and collaborative regulations. GIFT City is hosting foreign campuses with regulatory autonomy. As of May 2025, eleven foreign universities have established a formal presence in India. But these are islands of reform in an ocean of inertia. Policies have been announced, but outcomes remain limp. Inbound numbers refuse to rise. Regional competitors surge ahead. And India continues to supply the world’s STEM workforce while attracting hardly any in return.

It is also important to note that states, not the Centre, are quietly reshaping India’s inbound landscape. Punjab has quadrupled its numbers. Uttar Pradesh now attracts more foreign students than Delhi or Tamil Nadu. Gujarat’s inflows have risen six-fold. Andhra Pradesh is rebuilding itself as a value-for-money technical destination. These shifts show that when states take initiative — better marketing, new private universities, simpler admission channels — inbound numbers rise. But education remains a national mandate, and unless the Centre builds a cohesive architecture, India will continue to depend on state-level improvisation.

The truth is, India now faces a fork in the road. It can either continue treating higher education as a domestic sorting mechanism — one that pushes millions out and fails to pull talent in — or it can finally recognise that global education is a strategic arena. The NITI paper calls this moment an “inflection point,” warning that India has the scale, affordability and institutional capacity to be a global education hub but lacks the decisive implementation to get there. There is no middle path left: either India reforms or India resigns itself to being the world’s largest exporter of students and one of its most reluctant recipients.

An OPED is meant to provoke, so let it be said plainly: India risks becoming an educational suburb in the global knowledge economy — a place where students are trained to leave, not to learn. Until visas are overhauled, campuses upgraded, branding professionalised, curricula internationalised and post-study options enabled, nothing will change. India will continue bleeding talent and foreign exchange while others build education systems that are not just destinations but engines of national strategy.

The NITI report offers data. India now needs to offer direction. (IPA Service)