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At least two Australian universities, ranked among the world’s top 300, have reached out to the Union government to set up independent offshore campuses in India, The Sunday Express has learned.
The two higher education institutions are in talks with the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) to establish independent “international branch campuses” in GIFT City near Gandhinagar in Gujarat.
Source said a formal announcement about one of the two Australian universities, ranked in the 250-300 band of QS World University Ranking and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, is likely to be made by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese during his visit to Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar early next month.
The development comes four months after the IFSCA (the GIFT City regulator) framed the rulebook to allow foreign universities to set up campuses in India through GIFT City.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had first announced in her Budget speech last year that world-class foreign universities and institutions would be allowed in GIFT City to offer courses in financial management, FinTech, science, technology, engineering and mathematics “free from domestic regulations”.
On Thursday, IFSCA formally started inviting applications from foreign universities. “We have notified the application form recently. The two interested universities are in talks with the expert committee of educationists that has been set up for the task,” a senior government official told The Sunday Express.
“Setting up a campus in India makes sense as they (two universities) already have the highest presence of students from India,” another government official said.
In 2022, in both the Australian universities, Indian students made up the largest cohort of foreign students and represented at least a quarter of foreign student enrollment in their Australian campuses.
The interest expressed by the Australian universities comes at a time when the University Grants Commission (UGC) is drafting rules to govern foreign educational institutions that want to set up campuses in India. However, the UGC rules will be applicable to all such potential projects, except those in GIFT City, where only the IFSCA guidelines will be applicable. Speaking to The Sunday Express last week, UGC Chairman M Jagadesh Kumar had said the higher education regulator was in talks with universities from New Zealand and Europe.
Meanwhile, the IFSCA’s notified regulations underline that the courses or programmes to be offered by the foreign universities’ campuses in GIFT City “shall be identical in all respects with the course or programme” offered by them back home.
The degree, diploma or certificates will also have to be identical, the regulations state. These shall also “enjoy the same recognition and status as if they were conducted by the parent entity in its home jurisdiction”.The regulations also allow foreign institutes to repatriate profits from campuses they set up in GIFT City.
Although the NDA government officially announced its commitment to the entry of foreign universities in the National Education Policy document in July 2020, the idea goes back to the 1990s.
Governments in the past have made several attempts to enact legislation for the entry, operation and regulation of foreign universities in the country. The first was in 1995 when a Bill was introduced but could not go forward. In 2005-06, too, the draft law could only go up to the Cabinet stage.
The last attempt was by UPA-II in 2010 in the shape of the Foreign Educational Institutions Bill, which failed to pass muster in Parliament and lapsed in 2014 since the BJP, Left and Samajwadi Party opposed it.
