When I wrote about Eruditus last month, I was describing a structural shift that had just become visible. Seven universities, three cities, one platform. I argued then that what was being called an education story was, at its deeper level, a platform economics story. I argued that the infrastructure operator – not the university, not the regulator – was becoming the decisive actor in India’s emerging IBC landscape.
Three weeks later, Birkbeck, University of London received its Letter of Intent from India’s Ministry of Education. It is opening a campus in a Bengaluru tech park. Its operational partner is ECA – the Education Centre of Australia.
The picture is now complete enough to name.
What has arrived in India is not a collection of international branch campuses. It is a platform oligopoly.
The Cast of Operators
In the six months since NEP 2020’s foreign university provisions began to produce real campuses, a small set of commercial platform operators has quietly intermediated the majority of IBC activity. Eruditus (Daskalos), ECA (UniQuad), Navitas, GEDU, and Oxford International collectively sit between almost every foreign university and its India operations. Seven of the nine British universities currently planning India campuses are working with Eruditus alone, according to PIE News. ECA, the newest entrant, has announced Birkbeck as its proof-of-concept and stated explicitly that Bengaluru is “the first of many.”
These are not agents. They are not support services. They are, as I described in the March series, infrastructure that becomes the institution – controlling physical premises, recruitment pipelines, student services, digital learning systems, and in some cases, admissions decisions. The university provides the degree and the brand. The platform provides everything else.
This is not hypothetical. ECA’s own CEO Rupesh Singh states it plainly on his LinkedIn profile: “ECA partners and invests with universities to open campuses so that universities have access to new markets. ECA takes care of all legal processes and investment requirements to set up campus operations.” In that sentence, the university is the passenger. ECA is the vehicle.
The Oligopoly Dynamics
An oligopoly does not require explicit coordination. It requires only that a small number of actors control the access points to a market – and that the market’s participants cannot easily circumvent them.
That is precisely the structure now forming. A foreign university wishing to enter India faces an imposing set of requirements: regulatory compliance, physical premises, local entity formation, recruitment infrastructure, faculty sourcing, student visa navigation, and employability partnerships. Very few foreign universities can build that stack independently. The platforms can – and they have already built it, or are building it at scale across multiple university clients.
The result is structural lock-in, for universities and students alike. A university that enters India via an Eruditus or ECA arrangement saves years of market-entry time and tens of millions in capital expenditure. But it also concedes operational control – and, over time, the ability to exit without significant disruption. Students enrolling in a “University of X” campus may find that the institution shaping their daily experience is not the University of X at all, but the platform company that operates the building, runs the recruitment, and manages the learning system.
I called this the governance gap in March. It has not narrowed.
The New Variable: The Distress-Driven Platform
Eruditus arrived in India as an ambition-driven platform – Indian-founded, VC-backed, specifically positioned to exploit the opening NEP 2020 created. Its incentives, whatever their commercial character, were aligned with long-term India market-building.
ECA presents a different profile. It is an Australian international education services company entering its third decade in a post-boom landscape. Australia’s visa tightening and enrolment caps of 2024–25 materially contracted the traditional pipeline that sustained ECA’s core business – international students flowing to Australia. UniQuad, ECA’s India vehicle, inverts that model: bringing universities to students, in India, at scale. The motive is coherent. But it is worth naming: ECA is not in India because India is its primary opportunity. ECA is in India because Australia, for now, is less available.
A platform that enters a market out of distress rather than conviction operates on a shorter horizon. Its commitment to quality, to institutional culture, to the slow work of academic reputation-building – all of these are harder to sustain when the underlying logic is business continuity rather than market creation. This does not make ECA’s India operations illegitimate. It does make them worth watching with particular care.
The Regulatory Architecture Was Not Built for This
The UGC FHEI Regulations 2023 were designed with a specific problem in mind: preventing low-quality foreign institutions from entering India under the cover of brand recognition. The top-500 ranking threshold, the financial solvency requirements, the academic governance provisions – all of these were calibrated to screen universities.
They were not designed to screen platforms.
The regulations require the foreign HEI to maintain full academic and financial control of its IBC. They contain no equivalent requirement for transparency about the operational role of a commercial intermediary, no disclosure obligation about revenue-sharing arrangements, no audit mechanism to verify that the university’s nominal control is substantive rather than ceremonial.
This is the gap I described in March, and the Birkbeck-ECA case sharpens it. Birkbeck holds the LoI. Birkbeck’s name is on the degree. But ECA holds the campus infrastructure, the agent network of 4,000 recruiters, the digital learning systems, and the operational blueprint that will be replicated across multiple future university clients. In any reasonable analysis of actual power, the platform is not subordinate to the institution. It is the condition of its existence in India.
The Question the Press Releases Do Not Ask
There is a question that none of the April 2026 announcement coverage – not Times Higher, not PIE News, not The Statesman – has yet asked: what happens to students when – or, if – the platform withdraws?
University partnerships are not permanent. Commercial arrangements end – through financial stress, strategic realignment, or simply better offers elsewhere. ECA has built a “scalable blueprint” designed to be replicated across many universities. If that blueprint is replicated with a competitor of Birkbeck’s, the commercial logic of the ECA-Birkbeck partnership comes under pressure. If ECA’s India operations do not reach projected scale, the business case for maintaining the campus weakens.
When a traditional IBC closes – as some have, globally – the disruption falls primarily on the foreign university’s reputation and on the students mid-programme. When a platform-operated IBC closes, the disruption is potentially systemic: affecting multiple universities, multiple cohorts, across multiple cities simultaneously.
India’s regulators have not yet been tested by a platform failure. They should be thinking about it now, before the platform oligopoly consolidates further.
What This Means for Universities Considering India
I have argued before – and the argument has not changed – that India is a genuine and serious opportunity for foreign universities willing to engage with it on its own terms, at the pace it requires, with the institutional commitment it demands. The opening created by NEP 2020 and the UGC Regulations 2023 is real.
What is also real is that the platform intermediary has inserted itself between that opportunity and the universities seeking it. The intermediary is not always the wrong choice. Navitas has built sustainable pathway programmes. Eruditus has demonstrated that Indian students will pay for well-branded, professionally delivered learning experiences.
But the terms of engagement matter. A university that outsources its India operations to a platform – and retains only the degree-awarding function – has not really entered India. It has licensed its brand to someone who has. The distinction matters for students, for regulators, and for the long-term credibility of the IBC model in India.
The platform oligopoly has arrived. The question is whether India’s regulatory architecture – and its universities’ strategic instincts – are equal to it.
There is a detail in the Birkbeck case that has received no commentary, but deserves it. Birkbeck’s legal name is Birkbeck College, University of London – it is a constituent college of the University of London federation, not a freestanding university. It has held degree-awarding powers of its own since 2012, but has deliberately chosen not to exercise them, preferring to award University of London degrees on behalf of its students. The degree its Bengaluru students will receive will say “University of London” – an institution that has no formal presence in, and bears no direct regulatory accountability to, India’s UGC framework.
This means the Birkbeck India campus involves three distinct legal actors: Birkbeck College (LoI holder), the University of London (degree awarder), and the Education Centre of Australia (campus operator).
The UGC’s regulatory architecture assumes a single, accountable foreign institution. What has in fact arrived is a nested structure – a college sheltering under a federal university’s brand, operationalised by an Australian company – in which it is genuinely unclear where ultimate accountability resides. If a student is wrongly failed, a programme is abruptly discontinued, or the campus closes mid-cycle, which of these three entities answers to the UGC? That question has no current answer in Indian regulatory law. It should have one.
