The Rhetoric Versus the Reality
Diplomatic visits between New Delhi and Jakarta follow a predictable script. Leaders smile, exchange pleasantries about shared maritime borders, invoke the historical linkages of the Ramayana, and pledge to deepen strategic ties. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s July 2026 visit to Indonesia, at the invitation of President Prabowo Subianto, marks another iteration of this geopolitical dance. Behind the standard press releases, members of the Indian diaspora are raising a vital point. Ajay Mulani, the Secretary of the long-standing Gandhi Seva Loka foundation in Jakarta, openly expressed hope that this visit will finally force bilateral ties to expand into the education sector.
He is pointing to a massive, unresolved gap. Despite decades of friendly relations and a shared status as emerging economic giants, educational collaboration between India and Indonesia remains shockingly thin.
The math does not add up. India boasts the world’s largest youth population and an expanding network of top-tier technology institutes. Indonesia represents the largest economy in Southeast Asia, currently undergoing a massive structural shift to escape the middle-income trap. Yet, the number of Indonesian students studying in India is negligible. The number of Indian universities with a functional, brick-and-mortar footprint in Indonesia is zero.
Talk is cheap. For twenty years, joint statements have promised to build academic corridors. The reality is a story of bureaucratic inertia, regulatory mismatches, and mutual ignorance that both governments conveniently ignore.
The Invisible Barriers in Jakarta and New Delhi
To understand why this failure persists, one must look at the structural machinery of both nations. Indonesia has a constitutional mandate to spend twenty percent of its national budget on education. This is an impressive fiscal commitment on paper. In practice, the Indonesian educational system is heavily dominated by public sector institutions and tightly protected domestic networks. Foreign institutions trying to enter the market face a wall of regulatory hurdles.
The bureaucracy is unforgiving. For a foreign university to set up operations or offer dual degrees in Indonesia, it must navigate a maze of approvals from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology.
The regulations often demand that foreign entities align perfectly with national curriculum standards like Pancasila education. While local foundations like Gandhi Seva Loka have successfully run schools teaching Cambridge and Indian CBSE curriculums for decades, translating that success to higher education is an entirely different battle.
New Delhi is equally to blame. India’s own administrative apparatus has historically viewed international academic collaboration through a lens of suspicion and extreme caution. The University Grants Commission and the Ministry of Education have spent years drafting and rewriting guidelines for foreign campuses in India, while paying very little attention to how Indian universities can export their expertise abroad.
Indian institutions are chronically insular. They focus almost entirely on domestic demand. The sheer pressure of catering to millions of Indian applicants means that admissions offices at the Indian Institutes of Technology or top central universities have little incentive to recruit internationally. When they do look abroad, their gaze turns toward the West or the Middle East, where wealthy diasporas can fund expensive satellite campuses. Southeast Asia is treated as an afterthought.
The Illusion of Cultural Closeness
Diplomats love to discuss cultural proximity. They point to the ancient trading routes, the shared Sanskrit words in the Indonesian language, and the historical influence of Indian philosophy on Java and Bali. This narrative creates a false sense of familiarity. It masks a profound contemporary ignorance.
The average Indian student or academic knows almost nothing about modern Indonesia. They view it through a narrow lens of tourism, associating the entire archipelago with the beaches of Bali. They do not see Jakarta as a thriving hub of financial technology, logistics, and digital commerce.
Conversely, Indonesian students rarely view India as an educational destination. The dominant perception of India in the Indonesian consciousness is shaped by Bollywood movies and old news reports of urban poverty. When an ambitious young Indonesian from Jakarta or Surabaya thinks about studying abroad, India is not even on the longlist. They look to Australia, Singapore, Japan, or the United States.
This is a failure of public diplomacy. India has failed to brand its higher education sector as a premium, cost-effective alternative to Western universities. The country possesses some of the best engineering and management schools in the world, yet it has done next to nothing to market these assets to its immediate maritime neighbor.
The Digital Tech Mismatch
The tragedy of this disconnect is that Indonesia desperately needs what India has in abundance. President Prabowo Subianto’s administration is pushing hard for digital transformation across all levels of the Indonesian economy. The archipelago faces a severe shortage of skilled human capital in software engineering, data science, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity.
India is a recognized powerhouse in these exact domains. The Indian digital public infrastructure model, built on the foundations of open-source identity and payment systems, is admired worldwide. This expertise should be the ultimate selling point for bilateral educational trade.
Instead, we see missed opportunities. Rather than establishing systemic institutional partnerships, the cooperation is limited to small-scale short-term scholarships and training programs offered through the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation framework. These programs touch a few dozen individuals a year. They do not scale.
What Indonesia requires is an institutional overhaul. It needs Indian institutes to help design curriculums, train local faculty, and establish joint research centers focused on the specific challenges of the Global South.
The Public Private Partnership Problem
Another significant roadblock lies in the financial architecture of educational investments. In Indonesia, the sectors that need the most development are heavily regulated by the state or controlled by powerful local conglomerates. Indian educational entities are used to operating either as heavily subsidized public institutions or as purely commercial private universities. Neither model fits the Indonesian landscape easily.
To break ground, Indian institutions must master the art of working through public-private partnerships. This requires a level of financial flexibility and political risk-taking that most Indian vice-chancellors simply do not possess.
Private Indian universities that have the capital to expand abroad are often deterred by the strict Indonesian laws regarding profit repatriation and land ownership. The legal environment requires a foreign investor to find a reliable local partner. Finding a partner who shares the same long-term academic vision, rather than a desire for quick commercial returns, is exceptionally difficult.
The result is a stalemate. Indian universities stay home, while Indonesian students continue to pay exorbitant tuition fees in Anglosphere countries for degrees that are often less rigorous than those offered in New Delhi or Bengaluru.
Rebuilding the Academic Corridor
If the diplomatic rhetoric of Prime Minister Modi’s 2026 visit is to yield actual results, both nations must abandon the old playbook of cultural nostalgia and focus on hard economic transactions.
First, the two governments need to establish a mutual recognition of academic degrees. Currently, an Indonesian student graduating from an Indian university faces a tedious, opaque process to get their degree certified back home for civil service or corporate employment. This bureaucratic hurdle acts as an immediate deterrent. Streamlining this process requires a political directive from the absolute top.
Second, India must leverage its strengths in digital education to bypass the physical infrastructure limitations of traditional campuses. The creation of hybrid, cross-border degree programs could allow Indonesian students to complete a significant portion of their studies online via Indian platforms, supplemented by intensive in-person modules in Jakarta or Bandung.
Third, the Indian diaspora in Indonesia, which has a powerful economic footprint through organizations like the Gandhi Seva Loka and major business houses, must transition from being cultural caretakers to becoming educational venture catalysts. This community understands the local regulatory environment, possesses the necessary capital, and has deep ties back to India. They are the natural bridge.
The strategy must shift from sentimental diplomacy to transactional execution. Without a deliberate, systematic dismantling of these regulatory and perceptual barriers, the educational ties between India and Indonesia will remain confined to the hopeful statements of diaspora leaders, while the actual talent pools of both nations continue to drift further apart.
