The announcements of multiple United Kingdom (UK), Australian, and the United States (US) universities setting up campuses in GIFTcity or Bengaluru, or Mumbai are seen as milestones for India’s global education ambitions.
As this lineup gets longer, a critical question remains: will these institutions merely teach, or will they also learn?
Policy context and the road to internationalisation
Let’s start with the context that sets the stage for this inward internationalisation in the Indian higher education landscape.
The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 proposed top global universities to operate in India, which was followed by the University Grants Commission (UGC) 2023 regulation that set the guidelines around it, such as offering degrees equivalent to those awarded in home countries, while allowing for significant autonomy on recruitment, repatriation of funds, and fee structures.
The move was aimed at enhancing the higher education landscape in India, and giving a near-home alternative amidst the large outflow of Indian students.
While the vision underlying this is to be cherished, there is real danger that these new campuses may operate as isolated teaching outposts.
I foresee two key concerns:
First, if the campuses are designed just for student recruitment, they risk becoming transactional spaces that are devoid of the research culture, and ethos, that made these universities globally top-ranked in the first place.
Second, if India is seen as just another market, they are likely to undermine India’s rich knowledge traditions and cultural nuances.
To overcome these concerns, the universities need to take a globally inspired, but locally rooted approach to building the intellectual ecosystem in their Indian campus.
This could involve funding PhD programmes focused on India’s developmental challenges with a co-supervision structure between faculty in India and in the home country.
This needs to be supplemented with seamless faculty mobility between international and Indian campuses.
Equally vital is the knowledge exchange collaboration with local businesses, community organisations, and think tanks, to serve as a bridge between academic inquiry, and societal impact.
A truly aspirational university could take the extra leap in capacity building of other Indian universities and even create joint professional development courses. Such efforts will ensure that the Indian campus becomes a node of research, innovation, and public impact in itself – much like its counterpart abroad.
Alongside this, it is important to decolonise the curriculum and embed India’s intellectual traditions. This involves co-designing curricula with Indian scholars, incorporating Indian case studies, and examples that reflect the lived realities of students.
Essentially, India needs to be seen not just as a site of delivery, but as a source of knowledge.
To ensure this:
Foreign universities need to set the appropriate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for their Indian campus that go beyond student numbers, and revenue.
They should include targets for local faculty hiring and capacity building, with structured mentoring and professional development opportunities for integrating with global research networks.
The university should track the volume and impact of joint research projects between India-based and home-campus faculty, as well as knowledge transfer partnerships with local businesses.
KPIs should also reflect student-led initiatives that engage with the development priorities of India, anchored on research-based, real-life learning.
India is rapidly emerging as a focal node, and a leading voice of the Global South. For foreign universities, getting it right in India is not just a strategic win, but an opportunity to build a globally relevant, locally embedded model of higher education.
If designed thoughtfully, these campuses could evolve into hubs for South-South collaboration, fostering knowledge creation and exchange across regions that are demographically the future hubs of education.
Sreevas Sahasranamam is a Professor at the University of Glasgow, Adam Smith Business School. Views expressed are his own.