Michael Wesley, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, University of Melbourne said the new National Education Policy (NEP) has given a ‘license to innovate’ to foreign universities. The new policy has opened the doors for foreign universities to establish campuses in India. The top 100 varsities of the world will be “facilitated” to operate in the country through a new law.
Wesley was in Delhi last week. He is the first major foreign delegation that the University of Melbourne has sent to India post-COVID-19.
In an interview, Wesley said, “We see the NEP as a license to innovate. I think that previous to the NEP, the ability to do creative things with Indian partners was much more constrained mainly by government policy. If you take a broad overview of the NEP, it’s really India putting a flag in the sand and saying India wants to build one of the world’s best higher education sectors.”
Further he added, “We want Indian institutions to partner with institutions around the world to enable us to get there faster and to do it in the amount of time it takes that’s necessary to develop this world class education system in India to meet the demand that India faces for higher education and so therefore we’ve studied NEP very closely.”
