What makes India attractive for foreign universities to set campuses here?
A few factors matter most: regulatory clarity and operational autonomy, a large and demand-rich student market, cost-effective infrastructure and an ecosystem that supports research and industry linkages. India has become attractive on most of these counts. The UGC’s 2023 regulations for foreign higher educational institutions give incoming universities full autonomy over fees, curriculum and faculty recruitment and allow repatriation of funds at the same time, India’s scale, English-fluent talent pool and growing demand for globally benchmarked degrees, particularly in technology and AI-linked fields, make a case for a strong pull.
How do you see this as the Vice-Chancellor of a university?
We see it as validation of the very gap Sai University was set up to address. India has long needed more high quality, globally benchmarked higher education options and both new-generation Indian institutions and incoming foreign campuses are, in different ways, responding to that. We view this as complementary rather than competitive. The more credible options students have within India, the less reason there is for talent and fees to move abroad.
Will Sai University look to explore partnerships with foreign universities looking to enter India?
Our university faculties collaborate with and are cited by researchers at institutions including MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford. In 2026 we signed new MoUs with Innopolis University (Russia) and the University of Alabama (USA), covering student and faculty mobility, joint research and curriculum exchange, alongside an existing MoU with the University of Salamanca (Spain). We are able to sustain this because of the calibre of our own faculty of which 60 per cent hold a postgraduate degree or a post-doctoral fellowship. We would certainly be open to exploring partnerships with foreign universities establishing a presence in India, particularly around joint research, faculty exchange and co-designed programmes, provided the collaboration is academically substantive rather than purely branding.
What could a foreign university campus mean for Indian higher-education ecosystem?
It raises the competitive bar. Domestic institutions, public and private, will need to benchmark more consciously against global standards on curriculum design, pedagogy and research output. It also expands overall capacity and choice for students and could catalyse easily faculty mobility and research collaboration. The one risk worth watching is stratification, if the benefits concentrate in a handful of metro hubs and premium fee brackets. This expansion is best read as one part of a broader effort to strengthen Indian higher education, not a substitute for it.
How will this pave way for collaboration?
Physical presence lowers the friction for collaboration considerably. Joint research, faculty exchange and co-created curricula become easier when partners are co-located rather than coordinating purely across time zones. It also opens the door for domestic universities to pursue reciprocal partnerships and dual-degree arrangements with these institutions now that they have an India footprint, rather than relying solely on MoUs signed at a distance.
How different is it to take an Indian university to abroad compared with a foreign university establishing in India?
The two paths face quite different challenges. An Indian university expanding abroad must meet an unfamiliar host country’s accreditation and quality benchmarks, often from a position of lower brand recognition than established Western institutions. A foreign university entering India, by contrast, brings an established global brand into a large, aspirational, but price-sensitive market and must adapt to India’s specific regulatory framework and affordability expectations. In short, going abroad is largely a brand-building exercise in a new market; coming to India is largely an adaptation exercise in a market that already wants what you offer.
Could we see this as part of the globalisation of Indian higher education?
Yes, and this framing matters. Reducing the story to foreign universities coming to India undersells the bigger shift already underway in terms of growing outbound research collaboration by Indian faculty, Indian institutions building their own international partnerships and a more genuinely two-way movement of students, faculty and ideas. Incoming campuses are one visible strand of a broader, multi-directional globalisation of the sector, not the whole story.
What should India and foreign universities expect from each other?
India should expect genuine investment in research and faculty quality, meaningful local employment and a willingness to adapt to Indian academic contexts while holding on to core academic standards, not simply a rebranded degree-delivery operation. Foreign universities, in turn, should expect a large and growing demand pool, but also a price-sensitive market and a regulatory process that is still evolving. Brand recognition abroad does not automatically transfer into instant trust with Indian students, parents and employers. That has to be earned locally.
Does the trend also reflect deeper collaboration?
It does, and we would argue that shift is the more consequential. The earlier phase of internationalisation in Indian higher education was dominated by outbound student mobility and occasional exchange programmes. The current phase, direct campus investment, is a visible next step, but the more promising phase after that is deeper research collaboration and joint commercialisation of ideas, anchored in India’s cost and talent advantages combined with established foreign research capability. That is where long-term value lies, well beyond degree delivery.
Is geopolitics a reason for foreign universities looking at India?
It is a contributing factor rather than the primary driver. Tightening visa regimes in some traditional study destinations, India’s rising economic and strategic profile and universities abroad diversifying their revenue sources amid funding pressures at home have all played a role. But the underlying driver remains India’s demographic scale and its sustained demand for quality higher education, which would attract this interest regardless of the current geopolitical climate.