(Why India Should Lure Flagship Universities—Not Build More IITs)
By Ravishankar Kalyanasundaram
Autumn 2025 finds America’s campuses looking eerily like its rust-belt factories in the 1980s—emptying out just when the world assumed they were unassailable. Applications are down, federal research money is scarcer, and students from Lagos to Lucknow now face visa interrogations that feel more like airport friskings than academic interviews. Even Silicon Valley recruiters are wondering aloud if their next outpost should be in Dublin, not Palo Alto.
Donald Trump did not set out to hand India a geopolitical gift, but that is what his second-term visa clampdown and budget squeeze have done. They have created a vacuum in global higher education. Voids, like nature, detest staying empty for long. The question is whether India seizes this one—or lets someone else claim it.
We have seen this movie before. When America withdrew from Asian infrastructure lending in the 2010s, China’s Belt and Road sprinted in. This time the currency is not steel and asphalt; it is human capital—students, professors, patents, prestige.
India already has 600 million people under 25, English as a campus lingua franca, and a tradition of charging tuitions that look like rounding errors beside Harvard’s sticker price. What it lacks is one crucial commodity: internationally resonant brand. The IITs are glorious but provincial; they sit in global rankings not for their research budgets but for the legends of their alumni. In the perception game that decides where the next Nobel or deep-tech unicorn will sprout, perception matters as much as performance.
The instinctive bureaucratic response is to mint more IITs, just as we once cloned central universities across every electoral map. That would be a mistake. Brands are not multiplied by photocopying logos; they are forged by scarcity, history, and relentless quality control. What India needs instead are Global Anchor Campuses in India (GAC-I)—fully co-governed joint ventures with the world’s top 30 universities, endowed, independent, and free to break every archaic rule that still trips an Indian registrar’s pen.
Picture a Cambridge-India Institute rising on the banks of the Narmada; a Duke-Ahmedabad School of Public Policy embedded inside the city’s design heritage; a Technische Universität München campus in Pune teaching battery chemistry next door to Tata’s gigafactory. These would not be franchise outposts hawking cut-price degrees. They would be “second homes” with their own senates, tenure tracks, and IP-sharing rules that make venture funds hover like bees.
There is another, often ignored constituency: middle-class American students themselves. With state universities hiking fees and federal Pell Grants shrinking, thousands are now education migrants in waiting. A Stanford-quality campus in Hyderabad that charges one-fifth of Palo Alto tuition—and throws in the cultural adventure of a lifetime—could become the study-abroad programme that never ends. India would not just import knowledge; it would export goodwill at scale.
Yes, there will be turbulence: ivory-tower resistance at home, political sniping about “academic East India Companies,” and genuine questions about brain drain. But the greater risk is strategic inertia. If India dithers, the same universities now courting us will migrate to Kuala Lumpur, Riyadh, or Kigali, where slick special-economic-zone charters are already on the table.
Academia is the world’s most enduring brand factory. It converts footnotes into policy papers, thesis advisers into Nobel selectors, exchange students into future ambassadors. When those networks form around Delhi, not Davis, they will pay reputational returns long after the initial capital grant is forgotten.
Trump’s Washington has pulled up its academic drawbridge. That does not mean the caravans of curiosity stop; they simply look for the next open gate. India, with clock-tower campuses and coconut-tree quads, can be that gate—so long as it dares to think beyond carbon-copy IITs.
Let the world learn here. And let America’s lost students find, on our soil, the classrooms their own country just locked shut.
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