Sipu Jha
India is often described as the world’s largest source of international students, but that headline hides an uncomfortable truth: India does not send students abroad evenly. A small cluster of states has dominated outbound mobility for years, while vast parts of the country barely appear in the global classroom. State-wise data from a NITI Aayog assessment of higher-education internationalisation makes this skew impossible to ignore. Between 2016 and 2020 — including a pandemic year — the same names recur at the top, in largely the same order. Mobility fluctuates, volumes dip and recover, but the geography barely changes. That stability is the story.
The outbound belt: A narrow corridor, not a national wave
Across three benchmark years, Andhra Pradesh consistently leads India in sending students overseas. Punjab and Maharashtra form a second tier that rotates positions but never exits the top three. Gujarat rises steadily, while Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka remain permanent fixtures.This is not a diffusion pattern. It is concentration. Even in 2020 — when global travel collapsed — the hierarchy held. Andhra Pradesh remained first. Punjab overtook Maharashtra. Uttar Pradesh, despite its scale, slid further down the list. The pandemic interrupted mobility, but it did not rearrange it.
Source: NITI Ayog 2025 report: Internationalisation of Higher Education in IndiaWhy population doesn’t translate into passportsIf outbound education were simply about demographics, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan would dominate the list. They do not. That gap reveals a crucial point: lnternational mobility is less about aspiration than infrastructure. States that send the most students abroad tend to share four characteristics:
Early exposure to professional degrees
Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu aggressively expanded engineering and professional education in the 1990s and early 2000s. That early pipeline matters. Students trained in these ecosystems are structurally aligned with global demand for STEM graduates.
A private-sector education backbone
These states host dense networks of private colleges, test-prep centres, counsellors and overseas admissions intermediaries. This lowers information barriers and normalises overseas study as a default progression, not an exception.
Credit and risk tolerance
Studying abroad remains a high-cost bet. What distinguishes high-sending states is not simply higher incomes, but the social acceptance of education debt and the availability of formal credit. In places where education loans are treated as “investment” rather than ‘reckless liability’, outbound numbers rise. This is why Punjab, despite its size, repeatedly punches above its weight.
Migration memory
Diaspora is a pipeline that renews itself. Regions with earlier waves of migration carry a “memory” that reduces uncertainty. Seniors mentor juniors. Families know which colleges are safe bets. Failure feels survivable because someone you know has failed and still landed on their feet. Policy brochures cannot compete with that.
Destinations shifted between 2016 and 2020 but the sending states did not
Between 2016 and 2020, the geography of where Indian students went changed markedly, even as who sent them remained largely the same.In 2016, the United States was the top destination for Indian students, with Canada and Australia following, and the UK further down the list. By 2020, that hierarchy had shifted: Canada moved into the top slot, edging past the US, while the UK climbed and Germany began to register as a meaningful alternative. Australia remained a major destination, but the overall pecking order became more fluid.
In other words, destinations proved responsive to policy signals: Post-study work routes, visa timelines, cost pressures, and perceived settlement pathways. Students and families adjusted. The flow bent towards whichever country offered the clearest mix of study, work and long-term prospects at that moment.But here is the part that often gets missed. Despite this churn in destinations, the Indian states supplying those students barely changed and the numbers show it.
Why destination churn did not broaden India’s sending map
States with established outbound ecosystems were able to pivot smoothly as global doors opened and closed. When Canada expanded post-study work options, these states channelled students there. When the UK revived its work route, the same regions adjusted again. Even Germany’s gradual rise was largely absorbed through students already embedded in technical and professional pipelines.Global policy changes reshuffled where students went — not who was able to go.For states outside this corridor, the challenge was not choosing the “right” destination. It was clearing the far more basic hurdles of information access, credit availability, course alignment and risk tolerance. By the time awareness filtered through, the window often narrowed again.That is why sudden global openings rarely democratise international education. They reward readiness, not raw aspiration.For students in high-sending states, the question has long been which country. For students elsewhere, it remains whether overseas education is feasible at all.
What the persistence tells us and why it should worry policymakers
The most striking insight in the data is not who leads, but who never enters the picture.Large eastern and central states are almost absent from India’s outbound story. This is not because students there lack ambition, but because global pathways are unevenly distributed within India itself. That unevenness has two long-term consequences:
- Global exposure becomes regionally inherited, reinforcing state-level inequality. If the same states keep sending and other states remain structurally under-represented, global exposure becomes something you inherit by postcode. It is passed down through local ecosystems, not distributed through merit alone.
- Internationalisation remains a privilege layered atop already-advantaged ecosystems. India often treats “going abroad” as an individual success story. But at scale, it mirrors internal inequality. The students who access international degrees also access stronger networks, higher-return jobs, and global labour markets. When this is regionally skewed, the inequality becomes state-level and generational.
The larger irony
India is currently courting foreign universities, talking about global campuses, and branding itself as an international education hub. Yet its own outbound flows reveal a narrower reality: only parts of India are globally mobile.Until international exposure stops being geographically inherited and students from non-coastal, non-metro, non-migration-heavy states can access the same pathways India’s global education narrative will remain selective rather than systemic. The question, then, is not why Indian students go abroad, it is why so many Indian states still cannot.
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