Foreign universities to take corporate route for India entry: HRD ministry

The human resource development ministry has proposed to allow foreign universities to take the corporate route, as provided under the Companies Act, for setting up campuses in India.

The HRD ministry is in the process of finalising the UGC (Established and Operation of Campuses of Foreign Educational Institutions) Rules by which foreign universities can set up campus in India and issue foreign degrees, according to an official statement released yesterday.

The ministry claims to have the support of both the department of industrial policy and promotion (DIPP) and the department of economic affairs (DEA) for the proposal.

Under the proposed rules, foreign educational institutions (FEIs) can set up campuses in India once they have been notified as foreign education provider (FEPs) by the UGC.

For declaring as an FEP, a foreign educational institution would have to go through an association to get registered as a company under section 25 of the Companies Act.

The FEI intending to set up a campus in India should be ranked among the top 400 universities of the world as per the ranking published by Times Higher Education, Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) or the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) by Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

All FEIs intending to set up campuses in the country should be not-for-profit legal entities, which have been in existence for at least 20 years and accredited by an accrediting agency of that country or in the absence of its accreditation in that country, by an internationally accepted system of accreditation.

The FEP will offer programmes of study or courses to be of quality comparable to those offered to students in its main campus.

Each FEI before being notified as an FEP would be required to maintain a corpus of not less than Rs25 crore. The rules also provide for penalties ranging from Rs25 lakh to Rs1 crore in case of contravention of any provisions of these rules or UGC Act, and forfeiting of corpus fund.

The degrees awarded by these FEPs would be treated as foreign degrees only and the same will be subject to the equivalence accorded by the Association of Indian Universities (AIU) as per their system.