Student exchanges on the increase to and from India to Britain

For two consecutive Fridays I have had an opportunity to get a glimpse of how British universities are making their mark in India.

On the first occasion I attended the launch of an initiative by Glasgow Caledonian University with the Deccan Education Society at Fergusson College, part of Pune University. Held at the College’s attractive and spacious grounds, the Vice Chancellor of Glasgow Caledonian, Professor Pamela Gillies, announced that her university was bringing Indian students to Scotland for Masters’ Degrees in Life Sciences, including clinical micro-biology and food bioscience.

The first intake will start comparatively modestly, with about 60 students, and the University hopes to attract industry partners from both the UK and India. The number will increase year on year and, in another initiative, Glasgow will also be bringing about 30 students to study in Pune, as well as offering a scholarship placement for one of Pune’s brightest.

Pune, sometimes billed as the “Oxford of the East” because of its high reputation for education, boasts some of the largest student numbers in India, but so far its universities have attracted comparatively few British students – a gap which British Minister of Higher Education David Willetts was told about when he visited Pune University last year. Hopefully this new initiative by Glasgow Caledonian will start to build up the numbers of students exchanging faculties between the UK and Pune. The Glasgow students will not be short of amenities and student life in Pune: it’s been described as among the world’s top ten fastest growing cities, and is home to over 100,000 students.

I saw a very different form of education exchange a week later, when I went to see Professor Janet Grant, Director of the UK’s Open University Centre for Education in Medicine, at one of Mumbai’s largest medical schools, the Seth Medical College attached to K.E.M. hospital.  I was given a warm welcome by senior members of the College, including Professor Avinash Supe, head of surgical gastroenterology, and met many of the doctors from around India taking part in a week’s course to provide guidance on education and distance learning.

Professor Grant is no newcomer to India, and has for example been involved in helping to organise an 11 month distance learning course on HIV Medicine with a medical college in Vellore in South India.  The Fellowship course, including 12 specially designed modules, was to provide training for physicians in HIV/AIDS care to improve the availability, accessibility and quality of such care at sometimes very remote hospitals. The OU’s work in Mumbai and other parts of India is a natural extension of the visit by its Vice Chancellor to India last July as a member of British Prime Minister David Cameron’s delegation of university vice chancellors as well as businesspeople.

Both the Glasgow and Open University initiatives that I had the opportunity to see are excellent examples of the sort of links that British universities are promoting across India. Student exchanges between our two countries are, of course, far from a new trend – both Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, studied in the UK. But since the time that these two great Indian  leaders were in London the opportunities across a much wider range of subjects and universities from all over Britain,  and a greater flow from the UK to India, are developing at a rapid pace. Expect to see the numbers multiply, both ways, in the next five years and more.