By Alison Barrett MBE

Visualise this: Sixteen centuries ago, thousands of students from China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, Mongolia, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia flocked to Nalanda, considered to be the world’s oldest residential university. Their hunger for knowledge made the arduous journey worth every step. Now move back to the hyperconnected world of today: the journey is much simpler, but the hunger burns as intensely as it did centuries ago.

Globalisation has blurred borders – especially intellectual. The growing trend of internationalisation of education across countries bears witness to this. The late 20th and early 21st century was characterised by large-scale international student mobility. From a minuscule 0.11 million international students in 1950, the number of internationally mobile students swelled from 1.1 million in 1985, 2.2 million in 2001, to 6.3 million in 2020. Surprisingly, flow remained strong during Covid-19 – during 2020-21, the number of internationally mobile students grew from 6.38 million to 6.39 million.

India – the world’s second largest source of international students – leads this movement. In 2021, over half a million students, roughly 8% of all internationally mobile students, were Indians. This crossed the 1.3-million mark in 2024. Numbers are particularly telling in the UK where Indian nationals form the largest student community – 173,190 in 2021-22, up from just 17,715 in 2016-17.

A new narrative

The idea of internationalised education appeals strongly to students as it makes them globally agile and connected, hones their cross-cultural skills, and helps them develop a competitive edge so they become more employable. It helps them plant their feet in a deeply interconnected world and prepares them to work in teams that are highly diverse and multicultural.

This philosophy is being embraced by educational systems the world over. India is not only keeping pace, but also setting the pace. The National Education Policy 2020 (NEP) aims to convert India into a global education hub through research/teaching collaborations, faculty/student exchanges with foreign institutions, and targets 500,000 international students by 2035. It encourages high-performing Indian universities to set up campuses abroad, there are 14 Indian universities in the UK and other countries, and provides an enabling legislative framework for foreign universities to set up campuses in India. 

The UGC’s regulations for academic collaboration between Indian and foreign higher educational institutions to offer twinning, joint or dual degree programmes or to open a branch campus in India have been transformational. 

The University of Southampton recently became the first UK university to be granted a licence to create a comprehensive campus in India, in Gurugram, and we’re looking forward to more announcements. They join Australia’s Deakin University and University of Wollongong who established campuses as part of GIFT City (Gujarat International Finance Tec-City) in Gujarat last year.

Several initiatives rolled out by India aim to harness its ecosystem of over 1,100 universities and 50,000 colleges are making a difference. The Global Initiative for Academic Network (GIAN), the Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration (SPARC), the Study in India programme are aiding the mobility of students/faculty to collaborate and achieve research and academic excellence.

A collaborative partnership

The internationalisation of education rests on strategic collaboration and the recognition of the importance of mutual knowledge exchange and tech transfer. It bolsters international connections that enable stronger, more inclusive higher educational institutions (HEIs), and technical and vocational education and training systems. 

The UK and India are collaborating in numerous ways, for example, through the Internationalising Higher Education (IHE) programme, the Going Global Partnerships programme which seed-funds new joint teaching initiatives and helps connect academia to industry, capacity building and exchange in science through programmes such as the UK India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI), among others.

Expanding the educational sphere

India has signed agreements on the Mutual Recognition of Academic Qualifications with the UK, Ireland, Australia, and France. States such as Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Gujarat, Maharashtra, West Bengal, and Odisha are collaborating with countries to promote internationalisation of HEIs via curriculum reform, accelerating student mobility, and academic exchange. The Government of Telangana and Wales joined hands to roll out a unique curriculum reform project that stands to benefit 800,000 students in the state annually over the next five years.

The need for internationalisation of education is more pronounced than ever because it is, perhaps, the only way to create a unified global knowledge economy. That it prepares students for a globalised competitive world is just one of its many takeaways. 

The premise that makes it an indispensable proposition is the urgent need for educational systems to share their best research and academic practices for global challenges to be addressed. We know that an international experience encourages decision-making for the benefit of wider communities, not just individuals. The potential of technology in this context cannot be underestimated – it plays a pivotal role in making virtual and knowledge mobility possible, affordable and sustainable, in instances where physical mobility is difficult.

In times to come, as tech and AI act as force-multipliers to the global pace of development, the hunger for knowledge will burn brighter, fuelled by the imperative for international collaboration. 

Shared goals will make cooperation essential to build a secure future, find scalable solutions to common challenges, and nurture resilient, inclusive, tolerant communities. Global citizens with deep awareness of their interconnected, interdependent existence will drive this new paradigm – one of the power sources they will tap into would be the global knowledge commons – with internationalisation of education acting as a foundation and catalyst to the development of a truly global human intelligence. We are witnessing the surging green shoots of this knowledge revolution!

The author is country director India, British Council