With the permission of the Government of Nepal, around 5,000 students go to India for higher education every year. Government officials say that the number of students going to educational institutions in India without permission is much higher than that. But there is no definite data.
According to the data of the Ministry of Education, 66 thousand students have received 'No Objection Certificate' (NOC) to study in different countries in 8 months of the current financial year. Out of that 4 thousand 373 students have gone to India.
5 thousand 910 students went to India in 080/81, according to the Ministry of Education. 5 thousand 115 in 079/80, 5 thousand 10 in 078/79 and 4 thousand 455 students took NOC for India in 077/78. There are 24,000 NOC students studying in India.
Joint Secretary of Higher Education Division of Ministry of Education Vaikunth Aryal said that Nepali students go to study in India even without taking NOC. "Looking at the number of students studying in India, it seems that many students go without taking NOC," he said.
The government has no mechanism to regulate students who go to study in India without taking NOC. NOC is required for foreign exchange exchange and visa purposes. In the case of India, currency exchange is easy, while Nepali citizens do not even need a visa. "The issue of making NOC mandatory and organized for India is being discussed," said Joint Secretary Aryal. According to the Nepal Educational Consultancy Association Nepal (ICAN), 15,000 Nepalese students reach India every year with and without NOC.
ECAN President Sesharaj Bhattarai, while analyzing the details of universities and colleges in India, mentioned that the number of Nepalis among the international students studying in India is the highest. According to him, 25 to 30 percent of foreign students studying in India are Nepalis. "Students from the districts bordering India visit a lot," said Bhattarai, "Students reach universities and colleges in India through educational consultancy and directly."
Nepali students are reaching universities and colleges in Odisha, Punjab, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Delhi, Uttarakhand, Arunachal, West Bengal, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra and other states of India. Parasnath Yadav, head of Tribhuvan University Curriculum Development Center, said that students who have returned to India after studying without taking NOC come to get equivalency.
NOC is not mandatory to get equivalence. Most of the students go to India to study without taking NOC,” he said. Yadav said that because the regulation of NOC is not effective, students go to India easily.
After the mysterious death of Prakriti Lamsal, a Nepali student studying at Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT) University in Odisha, India, the Ministry of Education has started looking for the number of students who went to India. The Ministry has also requested details of the students who went to India from ICAN.
There are data that more than one hundred educational consulting organizations of Nepal send students to India for studies. According to educational consultants, there is an increase in the trend of taking Nepali students by providing facilities such as scholarships, as universities considered to be of the highest level in India have adopted a policy of admitting 10 percent foreign students.
A student studying in KIIT said that many people do not get NOC because they do not need a visa to go to India and there is no problem with carrying money. "Students who pay fees exchange money at the border when they go to India," he said, "Students who study on scholarship don't even have that much trouble." The students who take the required amount through the bank are forced to take NOC, said the student.
"NoC is requested from the bank to send the money to pay the tuition fees," he said. After the KIIT incident, the Ministry of Education has suspended the NOC for the state of Odisha. Shivkumar Sapkota, the spokesperson of the Ministry of Education informed that work is being done in coordination with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to return the students who came from there to Nepal.
Ministry has issued a statement and has drawn the attention of the Government of India to make arrangements for the resumption of teaching and learning at KIIT, taking into account the fear, confusion, and psychological effects that may arise among Nepali students studying in Indian universities.
