More than a dozen Western universities are reportedly planning to open new campuses in India over the next two years, including several from the UK. While overseas campuses offer financial benefits for the institutions and educational opportunities for the local students, there are also risks associated with operating a university branch in a country where academic freedom is routinely repressed.
In May, the University of Liverpool received official permission to open a new campus in Bengaluru, formerly known as Bangalore. Speaking at a “Letter of Intent” ceremony, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan announced that Liverpool “is the fourth foreign university to publicly announce its presence in India”. The others are the University of Southampton, as well as Australia’s Deakin University and the University of Wollongong.
However, this is just the beginning. Pradhan promised that “this academic year, 15 foreign universities are coming to India”. Indeed, the University Grants Commission (UGC), the country’s higher education regulator, has confirmed that several other international universities are in the advanced stages of obtaining permission to establish their own campuses in India.
While the full list of institutions is not publicly available, we know it includes several Australian universities, at least one American school, and the University of York. If approved, York would join the list of Russell Group universities with a presence on the subcontinent.
Imperial College London announced in April that it would open an innovation hub in Bengaluru, although this will not be a teaching campus. Liverpool hopes to open its doors in India by August 2026, and Southampton began offering academic courses earlier this year.
Although there exist more than a thousand universities in India, they fail to meet the expectations of a large number of Indians seeking higher education. It is estimated that close to one million Indian students are currently pursuing education abroad. This makes the world’s most populous country an enticing place for renowned institutions to establish new campuses. However, these universities should be aware that this new source of income is not entirely without risk.
Foreign campuses in less-than-liberal democracies have previously caused headaches for Western universities. In 2018, Georgetown University’s Qatar campus was forced to cancel a debate on God and gender. At the time, a Georgetown spokesperson acknowledged that while the University aimed to protect free expression, “Faculty members and student groups” could only “host events on campus that are in accordance with Qatari law”. Given Qatar’s strict blasphemy laws, debating God was pretty much out of the question.
In a 2024 report, academic and former Canadian opposition leader Michael Ignatieff noted that while Western universities with branches in China “tries to maintain an intellectually open environment in a host country that restricts access to the internet” most find that “putting these freedoms into practice has been difficult”. Indeed, as Beijing has become more autocratic in its control of academia, several Western institutions have cancelled partnerships with Chinese universities.
Of course, critics will object that India is not Qatar or China, and one of the reasons Western universities are flocking there is precisely to avoid the problems caused by more authoritarian regimes. While it is certainly true that the India is freer and more democratic than China or Qatar, it nevertheless has a troubling record on academic freedom.
Indian law includes several severe restrictions on freedom of expression, including broad statutes on sedition and “anti-national” content. In 2016, students at Jawaharlal Nehru University were arrested for holding a cultural event entitled “The country without a post office”. According to the Oxford Human Right’s Hub, the grounds for the arrest was that “dissent in university spaces which could excite or cause disaffection towards the lawfully elected government was considered ‘anti-national’ under Section 124 A of the Indian Penal Code”. This was not an isolated incident. On numerous occasions, university officials have taken direct actions to cancel politically sensitive events and detain students.
After the BBC released a documentary critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2023, several universities warned its members not to attempt screenings of the film. At a university in Delhi, officials allegedly cut power and internet access to prevent a student group of showing the documentary. Even more concerningly, about a dozen students were detained at Jamia Milla Islamia University simply for planning to host a screening of the film.
Earlier this year, Delhi University Professor Apoorvanand Jha, a well-known academic in India and a vocal critic of the Modi government, was denied permission to travel to a foreign conference because he refused to have the paper he was presenting vetted beforehand by the Ministry of Education. Jha was scheduled to appear at the New School in New York to speak on the topic “The University under a global authoritarian turn”. Apparently, irony is not big with the current regime.
Besides these examples, critics have long accused the government of meddling in the affairs of universities and education providers more broadly. It is often alleged that VCs and other high-ranking administrators are chosen more for their political connections than for their actual qualifications.
Similarly, the National Education Policy 2020 has been accused of deliberately influencing the curriculum body NCERT to make political changes, including removing references to the Mughal Empire and to the 2002 Gujarat anti-Muslim Riots, which Modi, as Chief Minister of the state, allegedly “allowed” to take place.
All of this is presumably why India now ranks 156th out of 179 countries on V-Dem’s Academic Freedom Index. On a scale from 0 to 1, the country scored an abysmal 0.16, down from a high of 0.66 just over a decade ago. If British universities think that their new branches can avoid these problems because they are not technically Indian institutions, they are likely to be severely disappointed.
Draft guidance for foreign universities published in 2023 prohibits them from acting in ways that run “contrary to […] the security of the state, friendly relations with foreign states, [and] public order”. This language mirrors earlier regulations, which requires governmental pre-screening of international conferences on any topic related to India’s security or internal matters. This broad definition can be used to silence dissent on most controversial topics.
Speaking to Inside Higher Education, Ashok Kumbamu, an assistant professor of biomedical ethics at the Mayo Clinic and a staunch advocate for academic freedom in India, said that foreign universities could have to “compromise on their liberal values” to accommodate the nationalist tendencies of the current government.
Indeed, this appears to have been the experience of the country’s private universities, which have been steadily emerging over the past 30 years. In a piece for Times Higher Education, Professor of English at Ashoka University Saikat Majumdar, wrote that although “[a]cademic freedom goes to the very heart of the new private universities’ academic ambition”, the reality is that their “financial independence is at best partial – and academic freedom is sometimes a strange kind of illusion”.
Even when the institutions are not directly monitored, staff and students are aware of the potential repercussions of crossing certain lines. Saloni Pradhan, a postgraduate researcher at the University of Leicester, has described a new “climate of fear”, which has led to “widespread self-censorship, stifling the vibrant debates that once characterised Indian academia”.
Could this be the future of British campuses in India? A superficial commitment to academic freedom and free speech, belied by the inability to touch certain politically sensitive or “anti-national” topics? Even if foreign academics are granted certain privileges of expression, their Indian colleagues and students might face a different reality, even when based at the same institution.
Ironically, the 2023 draft guidance for foreign universities mandates that the education provided at Indian campuses must be “at par” with that of the institution’s home campus. However, these same regulations are also what makes fulfilment of this requirement impossible, as they restrict the truth-seeking abilities of researchers and teachers, and inhibit the fundamental mission of the university.
Providing world-class higher education to a population largely without access to it is surely a worthwhile goal, but universities must ensure that they do not compromise their own core values of academic freedom and free speech while pursing it. If the Indian government insists on restricting these values within its borders, perhaps there are more suitable locations for foreign branches of Russell Group institutions.