Opinion: Why higher education partnerships are indispensable to UK–India prosperity

Following the UK’s largest ever trade mission to India led by the UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, Yashodhara Dasgupta, Managing Director of Coventry University Group’s India Hub, explains why the sustained focus on higher education partnerships is essential - and how Coventry’s presence in India is helping to realise this shared vision of UK–India collaboration and innovation.

Shared strengths and opportunities

The UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer recently visited India with a 125-member delegation of industry, academia and other key sectors. For higher education, the visit was especially significant, as both Prime Minsters committed to an Annual Ministerial Strategic Education Dialogue, reaffirming the UK’s position as India’s most established international higher education partner.

The UK–India partnership is one of shared ambition, complementary strengths and vast potential and nowhere is this synergy more impactful than in the higher education sector.

India already has one of the largest higher education systems in the world, with demand expected to reach around 70 million university places by 2035. Education reform is a key pillar in India’s ambition to become a developed nation by 2047 and a global hub for research and innovation. The UK is well placed to support this through the expansion of British universities in India - a collaboration expected to contribute around £50 million to the UK economy.

Coventry’s presence in India

At Coventry University Group, we’ve seized the opportunity to contribute to one of the most ambitious education transformations in history. Over the course of just one year, we launched our India Hub in New Delhi, now home to more than 100 employees and helps to drive recruitment, research, policy, enterprise and innovation across our Group, and also announced plans to become the first English university to open a branch campus in GIFT City, Gujarat.

Behind these milestones lie years of carefully cultivated connections and collaborations with our Indian partners, and as we continue to grow our presence, our focus remains on developing skills, creating opportunities and generating value for both countries.

Upskilling workforces for mutual growth

The Indian investments announced during the recent trade delegation, including green technologies, healthcare and creative innovation, show how closely the UK and India are aligned in their ambitions for sustainable growth.

The priorities driving these investments reflect our own focus areas and we are already collaborating with Indian partners to deliver on them. Our collaboration with leading industry players such as KPIT on postgraduate courses in strategic engineering management and automotive engineering and our partnership with L&T Technology Services to develop next-generation solutions for the automotive and manufacturing sectors, both demonstrate our mutual commitment to advancing innovation, building skills and supporting industrial progress.

Combining research strengths for greater impact

UK–India higher education partnerships combine complementary research capabilities to tackle the grand challenges of the 21st century, which require insights and expertise drawn from across institutions, disciplines and sectors.

Our Dual-Degree PhD Programme with GITAM, which saw us welcome our first cohort last week, provides joint supervision, shared infrastructure, and industry-aligned projects in clean mobility, advanced health technologies and artificial intelligence, enabling the students to tackle complex global challenges more effectively than they could through a single institution.

In addition, our collaboration with Hamilton Studios in Mumbai is digitally preserving India’s post-Partition heritage. By combining our digital heritage expertise with local knowledge and participation from Indian students and interns, the project ensures this extraordinary archive can be studied, shared and reinterpreted by future generations.

Facilitating knowledge exchange and global connectivity

Higher education partnerships are the channels through which expertise, experience, and perspective move between countries.

To empower students and researchers from both the UK and India to upskill while also navigating different industries, regulations and energy challenges, we have joined forces with Cochin University of Science and Technology and the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati to deliver an online course and interactive virtual labs on hydrogen fuel cells. In doing so, participants gain experience and skills directly relevant to the green economy and strengthen the ability of both countries to develop and deliver sustainable technologies.

The UK–India relationship has immense potential, but it will only be realised through sustained collaboration in higher education. If nurtured, these collaborations could set a global standard for how nations work together to solve challenges, create skilled workforces and deliver sustainable prosperity.