Australia’s Deakin University will be the first foreign tertiary education institution in the world to establish a campus in India as the Albanese government ramps up prospects in the rapidly developing sector.
The $4m campus deal will be announced during the prime minister’s trip to Ahmedabad in India on Wednesday alongside senior Indian ministers and higher education representatives from Deakin, the University of Melbourne and Universities Australia.
Late last year India announced new regulations allowing foreign universities and educational institutions to open offshore Gujarat International Finance Tec City (Gift) campuses and repatriate profits in a range of courses, including financial management, science, technology, engineering and Stem subjects.
Deakin’s Gift City campus – the first of its kind to be approved by the Indian government – will initially deliver cybersecurity and business analytics courses to Indian students, with a capacity for 100 enrolments annually.
Under India’s sweeping national education plan, the government is aiming for half of its young population to gain vocational or higher education degrees by 2035 – an increase of 500 million students.
Speaking at the announcement on Wednesday evening, the chief executive of Universities Australia, Catriona Jackson, will champion education as “front and centre” of efforts to strengthen the bilateral relationship, saying Australia is a “very willing partner” in the plan.
“It’s a great time of opportunity for Australia and India,” she will say, according to a copy of her remarks distributed in advance.
“Australia and India have 450 formal partnerships between them. Since 2005, more than 1.5 million Indians have obtained an Australian university degree. We can build on this – for the benefit of both nations.
“Right now, more Indian students are studying at Australian universities than before the pandemic … this is a golden era for Australia and India’s relationship.”
The Australian government has been quick to express its interest in capitalising on the country’s expanding sector.
Anthony Albanese and his counterpart, Narendra Modi, discussed fostering closer educational collaboration during their first bilateral meeting after the Albanese took power in May last year.
Last week the education minister, Jason Clare, signed a groundbreaking agreement with his Indian counterpart on a week-long trip to India.
The agreement, the most “broad-ranging” in the nation’s history, locks in rules for mutual recognition to access education in the two nations, including VET and tertiary qualifications provided online and offshore.
Clare was accompanied by the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, 11 vice-chancellors, five peak groups and a regulator on the trip, where universities announced memorandums of understanding.
Education is Australia’s largest services export to India, with almost 70,000 students studying in Australia at the end of January 2023.
Indian students are the fastest growing cohort of international students in Australia and the second biggest demographic behind China.
There has been a 160% jump in the number of students arriving from India over the past year, coinciding with a drop in Chinese student enrolments.
At the Australian Technology Network of Universities, which represents Deakin, Indian applications and offers are almost double 2019 levels, while Chinese applications are at 75% and grew by just 7% from 2022 to 2033.
Speaking at a Sydney dialogue, the minister for external affairs in India, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, said India used Covid to bring forward “important reforms” and was now “bullish” in its outlook.
“There’s one area in our relationship that we need to attack more strongly, and that is really encouraging more on the investment side,” he said.
“There’s today a great mismatch between geographies of demand and geographies of demographics … Education is bigger than education, it’s about the talent and skills needed to sustain the global economy.
“How do we expand in India the ability to impart skills and education? We would very much welcome Australian universities in India to do that, because having people around physically – we’re talking about 100,000 people.”
Also on Wednesday, the University of Melbourne is expected to announce plans to launch a bachelor of science dual degree with three of India’s leading universities.
The University of Wollongong announced its intention to establish a campus at Gift City in July last year and is still working towards achieving approval.
The announcement follows a lengthy partnership with Deakin in the south-east Asia region. The university was the first international institution to open an office in India in 1994 and the first to offer complete degrees online.
