Internationalisation at home. Just another trending #hashtag: #I@H, #IaH, #IAH?
What problem(s) do we seek to solve by this? Does the aspiring #vishwaguru need to import a #phoren template to boost its internationalisation credentials? Why not look inwards, iron out the creases, and chalk out strategies – instead of outsourcing yet another #initiative with timelines spanning 5 to 20 years?
#countinghashtags
In November 2025, NITI Aayog released its report on the Internationalisation of Higher Education in India, developed with an IIT Madras-led consortium. The document is ambitious in scope: 22 policy recommendations, 76 action pathways, 125 performance indicators, and targets stretching to 2047 – India’s centenary of independence. Central to this vision is “Internationalisation at Home” (IaH), a framework borrowed from the National Education Policy 2020 that promises to embed global dimensions into Indian campuses without requiring physical mobility abroad.
The stated goal is transformative: host 100,000 international students by 2030, scaling to potentially 1.1 million by 2047. The strategy aims to benefit the 97% of Indian students who never study abroad by bringing international curricula, faculty exchanges, and collaborative partnerships to domestic institutions. It positions India not merely as a consumer of foreign education but as a global hub – reversing the lopsided 1:28 inbound-to-outbound student mobility ratio that currently sees over 1.3 million Indians studying overseas while India hosts fewer than 50,000 international students.
On paper, it reads as visionary policy. In practice, it raises uncomfortable questions about what problems we’re actually solving – and whose interests this internationalisation theatre truly serves.
The Employment Void Nobody Mentions
India adds approximately 12 million young people to the workforce annually. Youth unemployment (ages 15-24) stands at 14.8%, though this figure significantly understates the crisis since official metrics count even one hour of work per week as “employment.” The graduate unemployment picture is grimmer still: in 2024, 46,000 graduates applied for contractual sanitation jobs in Haryana; over 12,000 candidates – including engineers and lawyers – competed for 18 peon positions in Rajasthan. Even elite institutions aren’t immune: two out of five IIT graduates in 2024 did not receive placements.
The sectors that traditionally absorbed fresh graduates are stagnating badly. IT sector growth has slowed to 4% CAGR, banking and financial services to 2.8%, engineering and manufacturing to a dismal 0.8%. Major IT firms cut over 64,000 jobs in FY24 alone. Fresh graduate salaries remain stuck at ₹3-4 lakh per annum with virtually no growth trajectory.
Against this backdrop, India’s higher education expansion – including the Internationalisation at Home initiative – operates in a parallel universe. The policy documents celebrate capacity building, curriculum internationalisation, and partnership pathways while remaining conspicuously silent on where the jobs will come from to absorb graduates with “internationally aligned” credentials. The disconnect is profound: we’re internationalising curricula for a labour market that cannot employ even domestically trained graduates.
The situation intensifies when #AI enters the equation. Data entry, customer support, basic coding, routine information processing – precisely the entry-level roles fresh graduates historically relied upon – are being rapidly automated. An estimated 300 million jobs worldwide face automation risks, with Indian freshers “feeling the AI wave more than anyone else.” Companies now expect advanced technology skills rather than basic digital competencies, yet most graduates lack these capabilities. India accounts for 16% of the world’s AI talent, but overall employability has risen only to 56.35%, reflecting a massive skills-supply mismatch.
The cruel arithmetic is inescapable: India seeks to host over a million international students by 2047 in institutions whose domestic graduates face chronic unemployment and underemployment. This isn’t internationalisation – it’s credential inflation at scale.
The Demographic Dividend That Wasn’t
The “demographic dividend” narrative – that India’s youthful population offers competitive advantage – rests on a foundation that’s crumbling. The dividend only materialises if the 7-8 lakh youth entering the workforce annually find productive employment. Instead, educated unemployment is soaring: one out of five educated women is unemployed nationally, with female youth unemployment reaching 41.3% in Goa and 43.8% in my home state of Kerala. Among degree-holders in Jammu and Kashmir and Rajasthan, female unemployment exceeds 32-39.5%.
According to government data, less than 0.1% of the hundreds of thousands trained in Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) were recorded as being placed in companies. The PM Internship Scheme shows a less than 5% success rate in securing internships. Growth has been fundamentally jobless – economic expansion hasn’t translated to widespread employment, informality remains high, and the skills mismatch with industry needs persists.
As immigration pathways to Western nations shrink – with countries like the UK, Canada, and Australia tightening visa requirements and imposing stricter post-study work restrictions – the traditional safety valve for India’s educated unemployed is closing. For middle-class families who’ve long viewed foreign degrees as both social capital and migration pathways, these closures represent fundamental disruption.
This is where Internationalisation at Home performs a politically astute function: it anaesthetises frustration. By promising “international standards” and “global competency” on domestic campuses, the initiative offers a palliative narrative – students can achieve global credentials without leaving India. This conveniently reframes what is fundamentally a loss of opportunity as a strategic choice toward educational self-reliance. The rhetoric around transforming India into a “global education hub” and achieving “Vishwa Guru” status dignifies what is, for many students, a forced compromise.
The TNE Paradox: Export Disguised as Partnership
Perhaps nowhere is the asymmetry more visible than in how Transnational Education (TNE) is framed. Indian policy documents celebrate #TNE as successful Internationalisation at Home – evidence of international partnerships and collaborative knowledge exchange. Meanwhile, on January 20, 2026, the UK government released its International Education Strategy, which states the objective with refreshing clarity: grow education exports to £40 billion per year by 2030, explicitly prioritising TNE delivery overseas.
This isn’t about academic collaboration – it’s economic extraction. Education exports already bring £32 billion annually to the UK economy, exceeding automotive or food and drink industries. The strategy explicitly commits to “backing providers – universities, colleges and schools – to expand overseas and remove red tape that can slow international growth.” Over 620,000 students across 188 countries are currently enrolled in UK higher education programs delivered overseas through TNE arrangements.
The UK identifies India as a priority market – not as a partner, but as a customer base. India’s large young population, growing middle class, and demand for international credentials make it “an attractive market for TNE” from the UK perspective. The British Council actively evaluates opportunities for UK institutions to expand their TNE reach in India. #IES2026
Meanwhile, India treats these same arrangements as examples of successful internationalisation, evidence of global standing, and pathways to “mutual benefit.” The regulatory environment has been actively liberalised – granting autonomy to Indian HEIs to offer joint degrees, facilitating branch campus establishment, signing memoranda on qualification recognition – all presented as progressive internationalisation policy.
Yet when a UK university establishes a TNE partnership or branch campus in India, it is exporting a service for which Indian students pay fees often denominated in pounds, frequently at near-parity with UK campus rates. The intellectual property, brand value, quality assurance mechanisms, and degree credentials remain controlled by the foreign institution. India provides the market, the infrastructure (often subsidised), the regulatory concessions, and the students – while the UK institution extracts revenue and counts it toward export targets.
There is no equivalent strategy for Indian universities to establish branch campuses in the UK, deliver Indian curricula to British students, or extract fee revenue from UK markets. The flow is entirely one-directional: UK institutions expand into India; Indian students pay; UK counts export revenue; India celebrates “internationalisation.”
TNE partnerships in India face significant quality concerns. Credit recognition and transfer mechanisms are “administratively tedious,” mutual recognition of qualifications poses “significant challenges,” and there’s weak infrastructure for quality assurance and data collection on TNE provision. Many institutions lack clear internationalisation strategies, leading to partnerships that prioritise enrolment numbers over educational outcomes.
The student profile reveals the asymmetry further. Indian students considering TNE are “more focused on domestic employment prospects and the tangible benefits of the degree” rather than transformative educational experience. Yet TNE models face “intense scrutiny from families highly attuned to local employment trends and return on investment” – precisely because employment outcomes often don’t justify premium fees. Unlike overseas degrees that may offer immigration pathways (now closing), TNE delivers an expensive credential with limited domestic labour market advantage in an already saturated graduate employment landscape.
India has systematically confused being a consumer market for foreign education services with being a global education hub. TNE partnerships, framed as IaH success stories, are evidence of India’s continued role as a revenue source for foreign education exports – now conveniently delivered onshore to capture the segment that cannot afford overseas mobility.
The Economic Logic India Ignores
Elementary economics suggests a simple strategy: export what you have in surplus, import what is scarce. India possesses massive surplus of educated, English-speaking, technically trained, and critically – cheap – labour. With 12 million youth entering the workforce annually, youth unemployment at 14.8%, and graduate salaries stagnating at ₹3-4 lakh per annum, the country sits on an enormous pool of underutilised human capital. This workforce is cost-competitive globally, increasingly skilled (despite employability gaps), and demographically young – precisely the labour profile that aging economies in Europe, Japan, and parts of North America desperately need.
Yet rather than constructing geopolitical frameworks to facilitate managed labour mobility – bilateral agreements, skills-based migration pathways, diaspora employment networks, sectoral labour export programs – India focuses on keeping this surplus domestic while simultaneously expanding the pipeline that produces more of it.
What India genuinely lacks are high-end research capacity, advanced manufacturing expertise, capital-intensive technology development, deep industrial R&D ecosystems, and institutional governance models that link education to employment. India’s higher education system produces negligible global research output, lacks robust industry-academia collaboration, and suffers from weak innovation infrastructure. The country imports technology, management systems, quality assurance frameworks, and educational standards – precisely what Internationalisation at Home purports to bring via foreign university partnerships and curricula.
But importing “international standards” through curricular tweaks doesn’t build research ecosystems or manufacturing capacity. It’s performative internationalisation – adopting the aesthetics of global education without addressing fundamental resource and capability deficits.
A rational geopolitical strategy would involve negotiating circular migration frameworks (allowing workers abroad with guaranteed return pathways), establishing sector-specific labour partnerships (Indian nurses, engineers, tech workers for aging economies), creating skill certification reciprocity agreements, and building diaspora employment networks that function as systematic placement channels rather than ad hoc individual migration.
Simultaneously, India could import what’s genuinely scarce: advanced research faculty on time-bound contracts, industrial R&D partnerships with technology transfer clauses, manufacturing expertise to build domestic capacity, and governance models that link education outputs to employment outcomes.
Instead, India imports curricular frameworks and quality metrics while exporting individual desperation – students paying exorbitant fees to leave, graduates competing for peon jobs, educated youth accepting underemployment. The surplus remains domestic, unproductive, and increasingly volatile.
Questions Without Answers
The threads connect to reveal a system that expands education enrolment while employment stagnates, celebrates TNE partnerships that function as revenue extraction, and announces multi-decade targets while dodging accountability for present failures. Several foundational questions remain unasked in policy discourse:
Q1 Who profits from India’s higher education expansion despite mass graduate unemployment? If graduates cannot find employment yet enrolment keeps expanding, someone is extracting value from this cycle. Are educational institutions functioning as revenue-generating enterprises rather than skill-building infrastructure? Does the expansion serve political patronage, real estate development, or fee extraction more than educational outcomes? Or, like someone once said, are event organisers and consultants the only ones benefiting from this?
Q2 Does India’s education policy deliberately maintain class segmentation rather than enable mobility? Elite institutions maintain global competitiveness and employability, while the vast majority of Indian HEIs produce unemployable graduates. Internationalisation at Home, TNE partnerships, and foreign university branch campuses create tiered access: affluent students access “international” credentials domestically; middle-class families pay premium fees for TNE arrangements; poor and rural students remain trapped in low-quality state institutions with no employment prospects. Is this bifurcation a failure of policy or its intended function?
Q3 Why is there no mechanism to hold policymakers accountable for employment outcomes? India announces targets spanning 20+ years yet there’s no retrospective accountability for previous failed initiatives. The PM Internship Scheme shows <5% success; ITI placements are <0.1%; two-fifths of IIT graduates don’t get placed – yet new schemes keep launching with identical rhetoric. Who is answerable when 46,000 graduates apply for sanitation jobs despite decades of education policy reforms?
Q4 Is India willingly ceding educational sovereignty to foreign institutions without extracting reciprocal value? India’s liberalised regulatory environment effectively allows foreign institutions to operate with minimal oversight while extracting fee revenue. Yet there’s no equivalent Indian institutional expansion abroad, no strategic framework to position Indian universities as exporters, no negotiation of technology transfer or research collaboration as conditions for market access.
Q5 At what point does educated unemployment become politically destabilising rather than just economically inefficient? Large populations of educated, underemployed youth represent significant political risk. Does policy discourse ignore employment because it’s technically difficult, or because acknowledging the scale of failure would expose the state’s fundamental incapacity?
Q6 Why does Indian higher education policy persistently adopt frameworks designed elsewhere rather than develop indigenous models suited to Indian realities? Internationalisation at Home is an imported concept; TNE follows Western partnership templates; quality assurance mimics foreign accreditation systems. Given that India faces employment challenges, demographic pressures, linguistic diversity, regional inequality, and cultural contexts distinct from Western contexts, why is there such limited investment in developing education models organically suited to Indian conditions? What happened to the Nalanda and Takshashila models?
Q7 What would a genuinely Indian-centric internationalisation strategy actually look like? What if India positioned itself as a provider of affordable, high-quality professional education for the Global South, rather than chasing Western student markets and rankings? What if bilateral agreements prioritised labour mobility frameworks with aging economies rather than TNE revenue extraction? What if “internationalisation” meant building research ecosystems focused on problems relevant to India and similar developing economies – water, energy, healthcare delivery, informal sector development – rather than importing curricula designed for post-industrial contexts?
The Amnesia of Policy Failure
The Internationalisation at Home initiative, with its 22 recommendations, 76 action pathways, 125 performance indicators, and targets spanning two decades, may be more than a trending hashtag – but only if accompanied by the unglamorous work of looking inward, addressing systemic inequities, and building institutional capacity from the ground up rather than outsourcing aspiration to imported benchmarks.
Otherwise, it remains what it appears to be: economic theatre that performs progressive rhetoric while maintaining hierarchies, extracting rents, and deferring accountability indefinitely. India seeks to become Vishwa Guru while facilitating precisely the opposite dynamic – a consumer market for foreign education exports, a supplier of cheap credentials to its own citizens, and a demographic pressure cooker with no release valve.
The hashtags multiply. The timelines extend. The graduates remain jobless. And the questions – deliberately, systematically – remain unasked.
Endnote: Who India Actually Hosts
Based on the most recent comprehensive data (2019-20 AISHE report with 49,348 international students), India’s inbound student population reveals a profile starkly at odds with its global hub aspirations:
Top 10 Source Countries:
Nepal: 28.1% (approximately 13,880 students)
Afghanistan: 9.1% (approximately 4,504 students)
Bangladesh: 4.6% (approximately 2,259 students)
Bhutan: 3.8% (approximately 1,851 students)
Sudan: 3.6%
United States: 3.3%
Nigeria: 3.1%
Yemen: 2.9%
Malaysia: 2.7%
UAE: 2.7%
The pattern is unambiguous: overwhelming South Asian dominance, with the top 10 countries collectively accounting for approximately 65% of all international students. Nepal alone represents over one-quarter of India’s entire international student population – a figure reflecting geographic proximity, cultural similarity, and significantly lower costs compared to Western alternatives. Students come from approximately 168-170 countries globally, but about 95% hail from developing countries.
This profile starkly contrasts with India’s aspirations. The students India currently attracts are primarily from neighbouring lower-income countries seeking affordable education, not the affluent international students that UK, US, or Australian universities target. The asymmetry is revealing: while India sends over 1.3 million students to wealthy nations (generating significant fee revenue for those countries), India hosts fewer than 50,000 students – predominantly from countries with even lower per-capita incomes.
The South Asian University: A Case Study in Institutional Amnesia
The pattern of announcing ambitious regional education initiatives without sustained political will or accountability has precedent. The South Asian University (#SAU), established in 2010 as a SAARC initiative envisioned by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, offers a cautionary tale that the current Internationalisation at Home policy seems determined to ignore.
SAU was conceived to foster regional cooperation and provide world-class education to South Asian students. The university began with two postgraduate programmes and moved to its permanent 100-acre campus in Maidan Garhi, Delhi in February 2023 – after operating from temporary locations for 13 years. Today, it faces severe financial difficulties because SAARC member countries have failed to meet their funding obligations. While India covered the full cost of campus construction and 57.49% of operational costs, other member nations – Pakistan (12.9%), Bangladesh (8.2%), Sri Lanka and Nepal (4.9% each), and Afghanistan, Bhutan and Maldives (3.83% each) – have gradually stopped contributing. Approximately ₹100 crore in contributions from SAARC countries remain outstanding, and the university has depleted its corpus of around ₹70 crore.
The university has lost its foundational South Asian identity, with student and faculty representation from other SAARC nations declining significantly. As one observer noted, SAU is “no longer able to fulfil the laudable regional research” mandate it was established for. The bottom line: SAU is no longer effectively owned by SAARC and is not South Asian by any stretch of the imagination.
SAARC’s virtual dysfunction since 2014 has severely impacted SAU’s governance. The university operated without a permanent president for four years before appointing a new president in December 2023. While the initial plan was to rotate the top position among SAARC nations alphabetically, consecutive Indian appointments contributed to waning interest from other countries, whose representatives felt they were not benefiting from the institution.
The SAU experience reveals a pattern: ambitious announcements, inadequate sustained commitment, governance failures, and ultimately, the quiet abandonment of stated objectives. Yet nowhere in the NITI Aayog report on Internationalisation at Home is there acknowledgment of SAU’s trajectory, no analysis of why a regional education initiative collapsed, no lessons learned about what sustainable internationalisation requires beyond policy documents and performance indicators.
This is the amnesia of failed experiences – the staunch resolve to sweep failures under the carpet and start afresh with new hashtags, new timelines, and the same absence of political and policy willpower that doomed previous initiatives. Until this pattern is broken, Internationalisation at Home risks becoming yet another elaborate announcement destined for the same fate: initial fanfare, gradual erosion, and eventual quiet abandonment as attention shifts to the next trending policy framework.
