A substantial share of the credit for leading the charge of India™s legacy boarding and new genre international schools into neighbouring countries and further afield in the new millennium, should accrue to the Kolkata-based Afairs Exhibitions and Media Pvt. Ltd. Dilip Thakore reports For over half a century, successive governments in New Delhi have made sporadic attempts to attract foreign students into India™s higher education institutions. In the early years after independence when there was heavy emphasis on Afro-Asian unity and the Non-Aligned Movement, a large number of scholarships were offered by the government-sponsored Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR, estb.1950) to school and college students from African, Asian, and newly independent countries under various programmes such as the Cultural Exchange Programme, General Cultural Scholarship Scheme, Apasaheb Pant Scholarship Scheme, Commonwealth Scheme, Technical Cooperation Scheme of the Colombo Plan, Reciprocal Scholarship Scheme, Scholarship for Sri Lanka and Mauritius, SAARC Scholarship Scheme and ICCR Scholarship Scheme. However the early enthusiasm of Afro-Asian students for Indian higher education tapered off as the Central and state governments tightened their grip on the country™s public colleges and universities, eroded their autonomy and drove academic standards southward. With not even one of India™s 35,000 colleges and 700 universities ” some of which were established over 150 years ago ” ranked in the authoritative league tables of the world™s best universities published annually by the London-based rating agencies Quacarelli Symonds (QS) and Times Higher Education ” despite the best efforts of government and ICCR ” the number of foreign students in India™s higher education institutions is estimated at a mere 27,500. Meanwhile, promoted only by word-of-mouth and information passed along informal grapevines, right from the early 1950s, a few dozen among India™s 80,000 English-medium private schools have been steadily attracting students from abroad, especially from the 20 million strong Indian diaspora. Barred from high-quality English medium schools by formal and informal apartheid practiced in former British colonies and protectorates, a large contingent of children of prosperous businessmen in these territories ” including your Uganda-born correspondent ” were packed off to boarding school in India. An unsung achievement largely ignored by politicians and the media is that India™s much maligned private education providers, particularly vintage boarding schools such as Woodstock, Mussoorie (estb. 1852), Kodaikanal International (1901), Hebron, Ooty (1899), St. Paul™s, Darjeeling (1823) among others, have hosted batches of primary-secondary students from the US, Thailand, South Korea, Nepal, Kenya, Bangladesh among other nations for several decades. In the new millennium this quiet migration of school students to India has received fresh impetus with the promotion of a spate of new genre, capital-intensive international schools distinguished by sprawling campuses, state-of the-art infrastructure, often foreign headmasters and affiliation with offshore examination boards such as Cambridge International Examinations (CIE), UK and International Baccal-aureate Organisation (IBO), Geneva whose school-leaving certification is unreservedly accepted by picky univer-sities around the world. Offering infrastructure and curriculums comparable with the best in the West at a fraction of the price of private CIE/IB education abroad,…
