NEW DELHI: The government on Wednesday launched its flagship Study in India programme aimed at attracting foreign students in 160 public and private universities which will offer 15,000 seats to them in the academic year 2018-19.
About 55 per cent of these seats will offer fee waivers to students from abroad as reported first by NIE on April 18.
Launching the scheme, Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj said that her ministry, through the Indian Council for Cultural Relations has been offering scholarships to 6,000 students mainly from south and east Asian countries but it had limitations.
"Now the programme by the Union Human Resources Development Ministry has no such limits. It's an open invitation to students all over to come and study in our institutions of higher education," she said.
As per 2016-17 figures, there are a little over 47,000 students of foreign nationalities studies in India but the government has set an ambitious target to take this number to 2 lakhs by 2023.
Under this scheme, the government has decided to launch mega publicity blitzkrieg in 30 focus countries-mainly in Africa, South East Asia, SAARC and West Asian countries for which Rs 150 crore will be spent in next two years.