A two-part series on transnational education (TNE), platform economics, and the governance gap opening up between them.

Something structural is happening in global higher education, and it is happening fastest in India.

The National Education Policy 2020 opened India’s campuses to foreign universities for the first time. The UGC followed with a regulatory framework. And into the space between regulatory ambition and operational reality stepped a new kind of actor: not a university, not a regulator, but a platform – a private infrastructure operator capable of doing what most universities cannot do alone in a new market.

Eruditus is the clearest example of this actor. In January 2026, it announced partnerships with seven globally recognised universities to establish campuses across Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Gurugram. The announcement was covered as an education story. It is also – and perhaps more consequentially – a platform economics story.

This series examines both dimensions.

Part One: When the Infrastructure Becomes the Institution

The structural argument – told through the lens of platform evolution. How distribution platforms across industries have quietly become more powerful than the content producers they once served, and why higher education is arriving at the same inflection point. Accessible to anyone working in or around international higher education.

Part Two: The Indispensable Intermediary

The analytical argument – told through regulatory architecture, platform rent economics, and the governance gap that current FHEI regulations were not designed to see. Written for a policy-facing readership: UGC watchers, HE strategy teams, government advisors, and university leaders with contractual decisions to make.

They are designed to be read in sequence. Part One builds the conceptual scaffold. Part Two fills it with evidence and mechanism. A reader who finds Part One interesting will want Part Two. A reader who encounters Part Two cold may find it earns its conclusions rather than simply asserting them.

The argument across both pieces is not against platforms. It is for eyes-open engagement with what platforms structurally become – and for the regulatory vocabulary that India’s higher education system will need to govern what has already arrived.