Foreign education

Balanced regulation is the key to success

The Foreign Higher Education Institutions in India (FHEI) regulations, recently announced by the University Grants Commission (UGC), have the potential to mark a great leap forward in improving higher education standards in India. Much, however, will depend on the spirit in which the regulations are observed by the UGC and the political dispensation. To be sure, these regulations represent considerable progress from the 1990s and early years of this century, when both the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Left parties strongly opposed a Bill allowing the entry of foreign institutions and it was introduced by the United Progressive Alliance in 2010. Even so, it is unclear how far the political ructions have been subdued to enable foreign universities and other institutions of higher learning to function without controversy in India. Certainly, the FHEI regulations appear to offer such institutions considerable latitude in academic matters, fees, faculty, remuneration, repatriation of funds, and so on. No doubt, the government is hoping to offer India as a competitive destination against the international campuses of Ivy Leaguers in Asia, notably Dubai, Qatar, Singapore, or China. But several issues arise from this apparent liberalisation: One is the fine print and the other is the problem of a level playing field with domestic institutions of higher learning.

Among the regulations is a stipulation that the operations of FHEIs will not be contrary to the sovereignty and integrity of India and the security of the state and public order, morality, and decency. In a country where public life and thought are increasingly being shaped by a prescribed politico-religious ideology, this provision has the potential to open the door for political interference, not just in the liberal arts but also in the sciences. National sovereignty and integrity are values that can be subject to wide interpretation, as several media outlets and journalists have discovered. In fact, the overt and covert pressures on think tanks and the administration’s treatment of dissenting students at Jawaharlal Nehru University and Delhi University — all theoretically autonomous institutions — may not encourage too many foreign universities to set bases in India without stronger guarantees of academic freedoms. The rules barring distance learning may also restrict these institutions to a limited catchment and make little sense in a country of India’s size and uneven distribution of higher education institutions. If the Indian Institutes of Management and Indian universities can derive a significant portion of their revenue from distance learning programmes, it is unclear why Indian students in more remote parts of India should be deprived of these benefits from foreign institutions.

And finally, there is the issue of domestic institutions of higher education. Given that few of them have bothered to evolve beyond degree-dispensing teaching shops, it cannot be the case that they should be protected from foreign competition. But the entry of deeper pocketed FHEIs does present a real social problem by potentially attracting the best and the brightest faculty from domestic institutions with offers of higher remuneration. This is already happening in the case of privately funded universities. Though this trend can be put down to market forces, the fact is that FHEIs entering in significant numbers could leave poorer students who cannot afford their fees reliant on increasingly sub-standard faculty. In that case, in India higher education too may end up with a K-shaped problem.