The Bill to allow foreign universities in India is a good idea, but do not expect a Harvard or an MIT to come and set up campuses in India immediately. Setting up campuses is not so easy and none of these universities will do it at one go — they will come into India in collaboration with local partners and set up smaller institutes/centres to begin with and graduate to full-fledged campuses only after a period of time.
What will happen immediately is that technical /management institutes will come in, and these will probably not be the top-most and the ones that we recognise immediately. But, once the top educational institutions understand the market, you can be sure they will be here. To borrow an analogy from the automobile sector, the first entrants in India were smaller firms like Suzuki — it took a while for the Toyotas to come into the Indian market.
Sunil Gupta, New Delhi
