London, Jan 12: A new report today highlights that international students from countries like India add 22.6- billion-pounds to the UK economy annually, indicating an overall benefit to the country 10 times greater than costs.
The Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) and Kaplan International Pathways released ‘The costs and benefits of international students by parliamentary constituency’ research in an attempt to push the government to introduce more welcoming policies for international students to stem falling numbers in recent years.
The analysis concentrated on the cohort of international first-year students attending UK universities in 2015-16, when Indian students comprised the third-largest group of overseas students in the UK at 9,095, after China’s 62,105 and 10,545 from the US.
According to Home Office data released late last year, a trend of falling student numbers from India was reversed with a 27 per cent hike in 2017 over 2016.
The HEPI now hopes that its research would add further impetus to demands for international student numbers to be removed from the overall annual immigration figures set by the Theresa May led Conservative party government.
“Trying to persuade the Home Office that international students nearly always benefit the UK can feel like banging one’s head against a brick wall.
Our work includes all the potential costs and conclusively proves these are small compared to the huge benefits,” said Nick Hillman, director of HEPI.
The institute submitted its report to the UK’s Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), which has been directed by the UK Home Office to conduct its own assessment on the impact of international students on the economy.
The HEPI wants MAC to use its data and report earlier than the planned deadline of September this year.
Linda Cowan, managing director of Kaplan International Pathways, warned that the UK was showing signs of losing ground to countries like Australia in recruiting international students.
“The challenge now is to ensure the UK provides a compelling and attractive offer as the best place to study. To be successful, we need a bold commitment from government as it considers the Immigration Bill to show the UK welcomes international students more than ever. A key step would be to stop counting students as immigrants in net migration statistics,” she said.
The analysis highlights that on top of tuition fees, spending by students from European and non-European countries has become a major factor in supporting local economies.
London alone gains 4.6 billion pounds a year, with Sheffield the biggest beneficiary in proportion to its economy.
The latest data collated by London Economics for the report calculated the financial contribution of overseas students, such as spending on tuition and living expenses, and balanced that against costs, including the extra pressure on local services and non-repayment of loans.
The report seeks to provide comprehensive evidence that overseas students are a significant benefit and that students from outside the European Union (EU), who pay higher fees, are worth 102,000 pounds each to the UK economy.
New Delhi, Jan 10 : The Union Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Wednesday gave its approval to a number of amendments in the FDI Policy, aimed at liberalising and simplifying the FDI policy in several sectors so as to provide ease of doing business in the country, an official release said.
The liberalisation of the FDI policy, which includes allowing 100 per cent FDI under automatic route for Single Brand Retail Trading, 100 per cent FDI under automatic route in Construction Development, allowing Foreign airlines to invest up to 49 per cent under approval route in Air India and allowing FIIs/FPIs to invest in Power Exchanges through primary market, will lead to larger FDI inflows contributing to growth of investment, income and employment.
While extant FDI policy on SBRT allows 49 per cent FDI under automatic route, and FDI beyond 49 per cent and up to 100 per cent through government approval route, it has now been decided to permit 100 per cent FDI under automatic route for SBRT.
Seoul, Jan 9 : North Korea will send its athletes to the the Winter Olympics in SouthKorea , the rivals said today after their first formal talks in more than two years following high tensions over Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme.
The two sides also decided to hold military talks to ease tensions and to restore a military hotline closed since February 2016.
Seoul and Olympic organisers have been keen for Pyongyang – which boycotted the 1988 Summer Games in the South Korean capital — to take part in what they repeatedly proclaimed a “peace Olympics” in Pyeongchang next month.
But the North had given no indication it would do so until leader Kim Jong-Un’s New Year address last week, instead pursuing its banned weapons programmes in defiance of United Nations sanctions, launching missiles capable of reaching the United States and detonating its sixth and most powerful nuclear test.
Pune, Jan 9: Union Minister for Science and Technology Harsh Vardhan on Monday dedicated India’s fastest and first “multi-petaflops” supercomputer to the nation here.
Petaflops is a measure of a computer’s processing speed.
Christened “Pratyush”, meaning the sun, the High Performance Computing (HPC) facility has been established at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune, and will be a national facility for improving weather and climate forecasts, an IITM release said.
While inaugurating the facility, the minister said that it would be India’s number one HPC facility in terms of peak capacity and performance.
The IITM release added that the facility would help the country with better forecasts in terms of monsoon, extreme events, tsunamis, cyclones, earthquakes, air quality, lightning, fishing, hot and cold waves, flood and drought among others.
The Central Statistics Office’s (CSO’s) first advance estimate for India GDP growth rate in 2017-18 at 6.5% is lower than the 7.1% recorded in 2016-17.
The Indian economy is expected to decelerate to 6.5% in 2017-18 from 7.1% in the previous year, marred by the twin policy blow of demonetisation and hasty implementation of the goods and services tax (GST).
In the first half (April-September) of the financial year ending 31 March, the economy grew at 6%, indicating that it will accelerate in the second half (October-March) of the financial year.
Data released by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) showed that the agriculture sector is expected to grow at 2.1% in FY18, slower than 4.9% in the previous year, while manufacturing is likely to grow at 4.6%, compared with 7.9% a year ago. Electricity and trade, hotels sectors are the only sectors that will grow at a faster rate of 7.5% and 8.7% in FY18 than in FY17.
The nominal GDP, or gross domestic product at market prices, is expected to grow at 9.5% against 11.75% assumed in the 2017-18 budget presented last year. This may make it difficult for the government to achieve the fiscal deficit target of 3.2% of GDP in a fiscally tight year.
The nominal GDP will be used as the benchmark for most indices in Union Budget 2018 to be presented by finance minister Arun Jaitley on 1 February.
New Delhi, Jan 12: In an unprecedented move, four senior most judges of the Supreme Court today called a press conference and said the situation in the top court was “not in order” and many “less than desirable” things have taken place.
Unless this institution is preserved, “democracy will not survive in this country,” the four judges said.
Justice J Chelameswar, the second senior judge after the Chief Justice of India, said “sometimes administration of the Supreme Court is not in order and many things which are less than desirable have happened in the last few months”.
Chelameswar, who was accompanied by Justices Ranjan Gogoi, M B Lokur and Kurian Joseph at the press conference, said they had met CJI Dipak Misra this morning and “raised issues affecting the institution”.
Soon after the press conference by the four senior-most judges, the CJI called Attorney General K K Venugopal for a meeting, court sources said.
At the presser held at his house, Justice J Chelameswar said “unless this institution is preserved, democracy will not survive in this country” and added it was “extremely painful” to hold press conference in such a manner.
He said the four judges had written a letter to CJI Dipak Misra some time back, raising important issues.
But all of them “failed to persuade CJI that certain things are not in order and therefore you should take remedial measures. Unfortunately our efforts failed.
“And all four of us are convinced that democracy is at stake and many things have happened in recent past,” he said.
Asked what these issues were, he said they included the “allocation of cases by CJI”. The remarks assume significance as the Supreme Court today took up for consideration the issue of alleged mysterious death of special CBI judge B H Loya, who was hearing the sensitive Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case.
Justice Chelameswar said “we owe a responsibility to the institution and the nation. Our efforts have failed in convincing CJI to take steps to protect the institution.”
“This is an extraordinary event in the history of any nation, more particularly this nation and an extraordinary event in the institution of judiciary … It is with no pleasure that we are compelled to call this press conference.
“But sometimes administration of the Supreme Court is not in order and many things which are less than desirable have happened in the last few months.”
All the judges rubbished questions on whether they have broken ranks, with Justice Gogoi saying “nobody is breaking the rank and it is a discharge of debt to the nation, which we have done.” Justice Gogoi would be succeeding the incumbent CJI in October this year.
Asked whether they wanted the Chief Justice to be impeached, Justice Chelameswar said “don’t try to put words in our mouth”.
The four judges, in their seven-page letter to the CJI, said “It is too well settled in the jurisprudence of this country that the chief justice is only first amongst the equals — nothing more or nothing less.”
The letter reads, “It is with great anguish and concern that we have thought it proper to address this letter to you so as to highlight certain judicial orders passed by this court which has adversely affected the overall functioning of the justice delivering system and the independence of the high courts besides impacting the administrative functioning of the office of the Chief Justice of India.”
“There have been instances where cases having far reaching consequences for the nation and the institution have been assigned by the chief justices of this court selectively to the benches ‘of their preference’ without any rationale basis for such assignment. This must be guarded against at all costs,” it said.