Indianising internationalisation of higher education: A perspective on International Students' Day

International Students' Day celebrated on November 17 is a significant occasion that aims to create an inclusive and multicultural environment for students internationally, encouraging cross-cultural dialogue and fostering a sense of belonging among the international student community, catering to their aspirations and experiences in today’s complex global scenario.

Importantly, this also aligns well with the focus on internationalisation in the newly implemented National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 which purportedly heralds a new era of Indian leadership in the field of higher education worldwide.  

With a major push to the ‘internationalisation at home’ agenda, we are all set to repaint our educational landscape on the world map. Certain bold policy changes have already been put in place with the initiation of the NEP 2020, reckoning well with the stated ‘Vishwa Guru’ stance on the part of India.

The prime goal as envisaged is to make India an educational hub with a ten-fold increase in the number of international students from approximately 50,000 to 5,00,00 per year. Consequently, a number of initiatives starting from reserving 25 per cent of supernumerary seats for international students to establishing a Study in India (SII) Portal - a one-stop facility for registration, visa applications, desired course choices, receiving offer letters from relevant HEIs etc. 

However, given the prevailing situation (including the adaptational and socio-economic issues) and trends in the migration of international students (the number of international students coming to India has remained largely static over the last decade), a revision of the roadmap approaching this issue appears overdue.

While it is argued that these students on Indian campuses create an intercultural learning environment, evidence also suggests that many a times international students feel socially and culturally marginalised, even feeling ghettoised at some levels.

In addition, no work permit during the course makes things much more complex for many students who have a different culture of higher education in their native lands (especially from the developed world, namely North America and most West European countries). 

Learn in India: Bhartiya Anubhav  

The relevance and response of creatively crafting an international student’s Bhartiya Anubhav (Indian experience) needs to be recast and reaffirmed. In understanding this, one must reflect upon the composition and direction of student flow and alignment when it comes to making choices for destination India.

We see a predominance of certain neighbouring countries, with Nepal having the biggest share (13,574 in 2020-21) and more than 50 per cent of students coming from South Asia (AISHE). This is largely due to the push factors like lack of access, higher cost and concern for quality in higher education, rather than pull factors.

To emphasise the appeal of the Bhartiya Anubhava in education appears to be a viable route to building Destination India. The essence of this anubhav is in realising a multidimensional, holistic learning consciousness that integrates culture, emotion and cognition in a uniquely Indian way, thereby uplifting human connection and well-being.

This essentially hints at a paradigm shift in designing educational experiences for the international community in keeping with our promise of reclaiming the identity of a ‘Vishwa Guru.’ 

An important dimension linked to the above is that of decolonisation, also providing a counter to the one-way nature of the Internationalisation of Higher Education (IoHE), dominated by the west at present. Top destination countries viz. the US, UK, Canada, Australia etc. pursue and employ IoHE as a strategy for the accumulation of capital, wealth, and knowledge for the Western world, making profit maximisation the prominent goal of IoHE, thereby attesting to the hegemonic position of the west.

This has resulted in an approach that is exclusivist and elitist at its core. In fact, in its pursuit to become world-class, most of the ‘Global South’ follows internationalisation policies and practices as designed by the west.  

India not only has a diverse socio-geographical possibility of offering situated knowledge experience but also the cultivated capacity to revolutionise new age learning with contextual adaptation. A few examples of this can be seen in designing advances through indigenous knowledge systems and bringing together AI (artificial intelligence) with Ayurveda, Astronomy, Vedic mathematics, Sanskrit studies, computational grammar, etc.

Further, the appeal of Indian art of living through yoga, spirituality, healing cultural spaces and architectural forms, folklore pedagogies, ecological paintings, etc. makes a better pitch for Indianising international higher education as compared to the idea of focusing upon STEM areas. 

In this mission, the first step should be to conduct a Pan India Survey to map the aspirations and experiences of international students. Secondly, India needs to tap its vast pool of diaspora (in addition to the alumni connect) with an experiential understanding of the gaps in learning and aspirations of international students. Finally, a worldwide network of collaborative practitioners needs to be evolved to give effect to the bridging of gaps in the present model of internationalising higher education towards the mainstreaming of the Bhartiya way of achieving this. 

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)