The establishment of international branch campuses (IBCs) by foreign universities in India, facilitated by the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and the subsequent UGC regulations, has been marketed as a major step forward.
This will help in bringing globally recognised degrees closer to home, reducing the massive annual outflow of Indian students and tuition money abroad, offering an international curriculum without visa struggles, and supposedly injecting foreign capital, faculty expertise, and cutting-edge pedagogy into the Indian higher education sector.
Yet a growing body of evidence and structural realities suggests that IBCs, in their current form, are far from the win-win proposition they are presented as. Instead, they risk functioning as a zero-sum or even negative-sum arrangement for India as a whole, delivering prestige and profits to foreign institutions and their private partners while providing only marginal, narrowly targeted benefits to a small segment of affluent Indian students, at the expense of domestic institutions, equitable access, academic culture, and long-term national capacity-building.
One of the central promises was that IBCs would attract substantial foreign direct investment into Indian education infrastructure and bring in high-calibre international faculty on a permanent basis.
Early experience shows this largely has not materialised.Most operational and approved branch campuses rely heavily on joint-venture or partnership models with Indian private education companies, venture capital funds, or specialised intermediaries.
The foreign university typically contributes brand, curriculum, and quality assurance, while the local partner handles land, construction, regulatory navigation, student recruitment, and much of the day-to-day operations.
This significantly reduces the actual quantum of foreign capital entering the country. In many cases, the bulk of the investment is domestic or leveraged from Indian financial markets, with the foreign partner’s contribution limited to “in-kind” elements such as curriculum licensing and occasional oversight.
Special economic zones like GIFT City in Gujarat further facilitate this dynamic by allowing near-complete repatriation of revenues and profits without standard Indian foreign exchange restrictions or taxation layers that apply to domestic entities.
The result is that significant surpluses can flow out of India relatively easily, while the promised large-scale foreign capital injection remains modest or illusory.
Faculty mobility has followed a similar pattern. Rather than seeing a meaningful relocation of professors from the home campuses in Australia, the UK, or elsewhere, most IBCs depend on locally recruited faculty (often poached from Indian private universities),visiting or fly-in faculty for short intensive modules,online or hybrid delivery components from the home institution.
This model delivers a diluted version of the “international experience” and fails to import sustained expertise or research leadership.
The campuses remain primarily teaching-oriented, with little evidence of the kind of high-impact research labs, doctoral programmes, or global collaborative networks that characterise the parent universities.
Perhaps the most glaring structural flaw is the asymmetric regulatory treatment between foreign branch campuses and Indian private universities.Over 70% of India’s higher education capacity is provided by private institutions that are legally required to operate on a not-for-profit basis.
Any surplus must be reinvested into the institution; there are strict limits on promoter withdrawals, executive compensation, and profit distribution. This model, while intended to prevent commercialisation, has in practice constrained the ability of Indian private universities to attract and retain top talent, invest aggressively in infrastructure, or compete on salary terms with better-resourced players.
Foreign branch campuses, by contrast, are permitted to adopt for-profit joint-venture structures, frequently involving private equity or corporate education groups holding significant equity stakes.
This allows far greater flexibility in extracting and distributing operational surpluses. The same degree programme can therefore generate higher executive pay, marketing budgets, facility upgrades, or shareholder returns for foreign and private partners, while Indian not-for-profit institutions remain shackled.
The outcome is a two-tier market in which foreign-branded entities enjoy structural financial advantages. They can poach faculty with better compensation packages, invest more aggressively in branding and recruitment, and still charge premium fees justified by the international label.
Domestic institutions, even those with comparable or superior academic quality, struggle to compete on equal terms.
Most IBCs target precisely the same demographic already served by India’s better-endowed private universities: upper-middle-class and affluent families willing and able to pay fees ranging from ₹15–45 lakhs for undergraduate programmes.
The campuses concentrate on high-demand, high-margin fields, business, data science, computer science, finance, design rather than addressing national priorities such as teacher education, agriculture, public health, vernacular-medium programmes, or access in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities.
While fees are lower than the full cost of studying at the home campus abroad, they remain out of reach for the overwhelming majority of Indian students.
The result is an enclave model of international education: high-quality but expensive and exclusive, doing little to expand meaningful access or reduce overall outbound mobility.
The outflow of students and foreign exchange continues largely unabated for everyone except the small cohort that can afford an IBC.
Moreover, the involvement of for-profit intermediaries and aggressive recruitment-marketing ecosystems raises legitimate questions about quality assurance and mission alignment.
When revenue generation becomes a primary driver, there is a risk that academic rigour, student support, and long-term educational outcomes are subordinated to enrolment targets and brand positioning.
By creating a parallel, better-resourced tier of education under foreign brands, IBCs can inadvertently weaken the very domestic institutions India needs to build world-class capacity.
Faculty migration to higher-paying IBC roles, student preference for foreign-labelled degrees, and diversion of parental investment all erode the resource base and prestige of Indian private and public universities.
India’s long-term goal should be to develop a larger number of genuinely strong, research-intensive, globally competitive institutions of its own, capable of producing knowledge, retaining talent, and addressing national development challenges.
Outsourcing prestige to foreign branch campuses risks turning India into a perpetual consumer of higher education rather than a producer, delaying or even foreclosing the emergence of home-grown excellence.
A More Balanced Alternative
If India is serious about internationalisation, a far healthier approach would combine the following elements, like Level playing field reforms, either extend meaningful for-profit flexibility (with strict public-purpose conditions) to domestic private institutions, or restrict IBCs to genuine not-for-profit or hybrid models with mandatory reinvestment thresholds.
Mandatory local value-add which require significant permanent faculty relocation, joint research centres, PhD supervision commitments, technology/knowledge transfer clauses, and community-engagement obligations.
Profit-sharing and stakeholder models which explore mechanisms (green bonds, faculty/staff equity pools, scholarship trusts) that allow academics, students, and the broader ecosystem to benefit from surpluses generated.
Focus on national priorities like incentivise IBCs to offer programmes in underserved disciplines, bilingual delivery, or lower-fee structures for meritorious students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Without such safeguards, international branch campuses are likely to remain a zero-sum proposition, modest convenience and prestige for a narrow elite, paid for by continued under-investment in domestic capacity, unequal competition, outward flow of surpluses, and delayed progress toward genuine self-reliance in higher education.
India already possesses the talent, scale, and ambition to build its own globally respected institutions.
The wiser path is to remove artificial handicaps on domestic players, massively increase public and philanthropic investment, grant real autonomy, and foster competition on merit, not to import prestige selectively while domestic universities continue to fight with one hand tied behind their back.
Naorem Mohen is the Editor of Signpost News. Explore his views and opinion on X: @laimacha.