Contrasting news on the trip to India. From the government:
"
- new UK-India Newton Fund programmes worth £80 million will address a range of global challenges through technology and science
- Science Minister confirms the joint investment will increase to £200 million by 2021
- annual £1 million Newton Prize launched for 2017 to reward science and innovation to support public health
The UK Science Minister has today (8 November 2016) announced a series of research programmes from the
Newton Fund worth up to £80 million to address global challenges affecting people in India.
The investments were announced during an event at the India-UK Tech Summit in New Delhi – India’s premier science and technology showcase. The UK and Indian Prime Ministers Theresa May and Narendra Modi attended the Tech Summit that brought together British businesses, science and technology experts to India, exhibiting UK excellence across these sectors.
The new programmes take the total joint UK-India investment in research through the Newton Fund up to £200 million by 2021, demonstrating the fund as a major bilateral initiative in India. It brings together the world class excellence of the UK and India to address global challenges through science and technology.
Science Minister Jo Johnson announced a number of the new UK-India Newton Fund programmes at the Education, Science and Innovation Futures event, attended by world-leading scientists and senior research policy leaders. These were:
- £16 million programme to support commercially focused research and development partnerships that bring innovative biotechnologies to market for cleaning, processing and using industrial waste streams (Research Councils UK - RCUK)
- £8.4 million programme to improve water quality (RCUK)
- £7.4 million programme on energy demand reduction in the built environment to improve health and wellbeing and lower energy costs for building users (RCUK)
- £12.6 million launch of phase 2 of Global Research Programme in Women and Children’s Health between the UK and India to study reproductive health issues facing women and their unborn children in low and middle income countries (RCUK)
- £13 million UK-India research programme to strengthen the global fight against anti-microbial resistance, announced during the opening of the first RCUK-DBT Strategic Group on AMR on 9 November (RCUK)
Universities and Science Minister Jo Johnson said:
The future of science and innovation depends on collaboration and India continues to be a vital science partner for the UK.
Through the Newton Fund we’re working together to improve the lives of millions across the world and we are continuing to look at opportunities to expand this partnership to include joint funding for social science and humanities programmes.
During the event, Jo Johnson launched the first annual £1 million Newton Prize, which will recognise the Newton Fund’s best science or innovation that promotes the economic development and social welfare of partner countries. For 2017, the Prize is open to existing Newton Fund programmes in India, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam which focus on the challenges of public health and wellbeing, covering issues such as, anti-microbial resistance, disease, healthcare, and nutrition.
The Minister also celebrated a significant programme to digitise the vast wealth of Indian printed books held by the British Library dating from 1713 to 1914. Two Centuries of Indian Print - a British Library project funded by the Newton Fund through the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) – has been extended to digitise an additional 3,000 books from the collection, meaning that 4,000 early Bengali books will be digitised and made accessible to researchers around the world."
Meanwhile, Oxford University aren't impressed by the apparent Indian charm offensive.
"
Theresa May’s three-day tour of India marks the start of her attempt
to secure post-Brexit business with non-EU countries. Yet the message beginning to emanate from the UK government is: Indians, we want your business, and your high-net-worth business travellers, but the rest of you are not as welcome.
While the UK wants to secure Indian trade and investment, India is keen to see improvements in the human dimension of their relationship, focusing in particular on the immigration and visa regime. Business and people, after all, are intertwined. People generate business, they are employees and innovators in it, and they consume the goods and services emanating from it.
May has given a cursory nod to the people side of India’s concerns. She has announced that a select group of high-net-worth Indians and their families will now be offered access to the UK, with the
launch of a “Great Club” for them. This is an “invitation only service” that comes with bespoke support from the government’s visas and immigration department.
Visa rules are not being relaxed for most. Laura Lean PA Archive/PA Images
Otherwise, the rest of the visa regime, which bears a strong May imprint from her days as home secretary, remains unchanged. In response to the Indian demand that visa conditions for students and skilled workers be liberalised, May
has said: “Nine out of ten visa applications from India are already accepted. We have, I believe, a good system.”
What this quote does not take into account is the self-selection that happens before people reach a UK visa centre in India. The window to that visa centre has consistently narrowed under the UK’s Conservative governments, across visa categories. For instance in 2015, the financial guarantee for those seeking Tier 4 (general) student visas to the UK rose
from £7,380 to £9,135 a year. This, in a country where the
average annual income is £933.
Not a good system
When a student, or indeed any category of visa applicant, puts together the funds and paperwork required to submit a visa application, they face questions, delays, and further entry barriers. This is so for Indian students, and those from other nationalities, particularly from the Global South. The experiences of some my students at Oxford exemplify how the UK treats the best and the brightest who seek to study there:
I had a terrible experience applying for a visa. I applied from Bangladesh (my home country) … the application gets sent to Delhi for review, which means that the process takes about two months. When I applied the first time I was rejected due to a clerical error. The worst part was that there were no instructions in the rejection letter on how to appeal the decision. The only way I managed to eventually appeal and get the visa was through a connection who worked at the visa office in Delhi.
I was incredibly lucky, honestly, first because I knew someone in the local office and second because the university provided tons of support – they also wrote to the Delhi office on my behalf. Other Bangladeshi students have faced similar situations and have ended up with lots of wasted, hard earned money and not being able to take up their university offers in the end.
Even if a student has a generous scholarship and guaranteed accommodation and living expenses, they and their family members are treated with suspicion. The UK government’s keeping of students at arm’s length is a reflection of broader political discourse. One of my South African students shared this experience:
I feel like I have to justify my stay in the UK to strangers. I don’t think people are at all aware that international students pay higher fees as well as NHS charges – that we are not ‘sponging’ off the system.
We can add the NHS charge to this potent mix of rhetoric, policy and practice that makes international students feel unwelcome. Since 2015, students from outside the EU pay £150 per visa year for access to health services. If a family accompanies the student, this cost is multiplied. It is clear that the government does not simply see this as payment for services they expect students to use. Instead, the government
proudly states that “after only six months [of the surcharge being introduced] it had collected more than £100m to contribute to the NHS for the benefit of us all”.
It is astounding that students and other visitors from countries like Mozambique, Bangladesh and India are paying for healthcare in a country where the aged
are the biggest users.
Killing the goose
If students feel unwelcome, face visa restrictions, ever increasing fees and living expenses, limited scholarships, difficulty staying on to find a job, steep healthcare charges, and entry barriers for families, the net result, even for the utilitarians amongst us, is the killing of the goose that lays the golden egg. International students are a major source of income and employment generation for the UK economy. They contributed £7 billion in income in 2012
and supported 136,000 domestic jobs.
But these students are now voting with their feet. If, going against the trends of globalisation, the UK doggedly argues that British jobs, like British universities, are for British people, it has no one but itself to blame for steadily falling student numbers. Whereas 181,000 non-EU nationals entered the UK for higher education in 2010, by 2015, this number was
down to 112,000.
Different agendas: Theresa May and Narendra Modi. EPA/STR
Indian students are part of this trend.
Some estimates say their numbers have halved in the last five years, going from 39,090 in 2010-11 to 18,320 in 2014-15. Some of these may have been the result of a crackdown on fraudulent education visas. But this focus ignores the practices, outlined above, that have contributed to international students’ general lowering of confidence in the systems around UK higher education.
By entangling education in nationalist jingoism, the tussle over net immigration numbers, and the budget deficits of key services, the UK government is showing a critical lack of vision. International students add immeasurably to the higher education sector in the UK.
The same can be said for the multicultural hives of ingenuity that are the UK’s financial, creative, health and technology sectors. UK universities, the City of London, the NHS and many other businesses and services
take great pride in their internationalism.
The damage being wreaked through a narrow vision of what the UK and its institutions stand for, is already being felt, and will only accelerate. As the UK delegation makes its way from Delhi to Bangalore, it cannot ignore that people constitute business. Chip away at people, and the business environment will follow suit."
