Inbound student mobility into India: Congenial factors and buffetting environment

Internationalisation of higher education spawned to be the necessity of the epoch and need of the hour. The process of and airing on international student mobility has been flowered in the proem of higher education after the execution of fresh policies in nineties having effects on all spheres of life. International student mobility in the world has not been infrequent or much scant in the post liberalization era. The students came in to imbibe the delicacy of the high quality higher education system of a country bewrays the level of its maturity and moderation. This paper tries to assess the congenial factors and buffeting environment of inbound student mobility into India and explore India's potential in it. The study entirely reposes on secondary data which were collected from various magisterial published and unpublished sources. The data on student mobility were collected from the publications of Ministry of Human Resource Development and UNESCO Institute for Statistics and unpublished source of Association of Indian Universities. Coming back from the breakup of its declared tradition in hosting international students, India is now back on track of enrolling foreign students in significant number. The study found that even though majority of the origin nations are under developed, nations like USA, UAE and Saudi Arabia are also sending their nationals seeking study abroad to India in greater dimension for years. It was also found that quality of higher education has profound command on mobility of international students. Though quality is the most important factor for inbound mobility of foreign students, mobility could be transpired in its actual form only at the backing of certain other factors such as prosperity of the state, urbanization, competent infrastructure, quantity of higher education and technological quantum leap etc.