India – an important partner for the future

Text: Sarah Kanning

India is a country of superlatives, a country with its sights set firmly on the future: with 1.45 billion inhabitants, it is not only the world’s most populous country, but also the fasting growing economy. It will have overtaken Germany and Japan in just a few years. Not only does India have huge innovation and research potential and a young population; its importance as a geostrategic partner and alternative production site is also growing rapidly.

65 years ago the DAAD established a Regional Office in New Delhi. The country has seen enormous changes during this time – and is expected to con­tinue developing extremely dynamically. The state is investing millions of euros to fund research at in­novation centres, while exports of services and high-tech products make the country a major global player. “If we think back to 1960, the year the Regional Office was set up, we recall an India that had just 360 million inhabitants, whose independence had only been achieved 13 years previously and that looked more like a developing country than an emerging economy,” observes Dr Katja Lasch, Director of the DAAD Regional Office New Delhi.

With its British roots, the country’s higher education system was still at a rudimentary stage back then, with key milestones having only just been set when the Indian Institutes for Technology (IITs) were founded in the late 1950s. The Chennai-based IIT Madras in particular benefited from intensive German support.

“The DAAD is regarded as a trustworthy partner and is involved in important issues.”

The fact that the DAAD has already been active in India for such a long time – longer than most ­other intermediary organisations – puts it in what Katja Lasch describes as a “comfortable position”: “The DAAD is regarded as a trustworthy partner and is involved in important issues. For some years now we have been seeing increased interest in Germany and bilateral cooperation. In recent years India has begun really focusing on the internationalisation of its universities.”

The Indian government’s National Education Policy 2020 is a good example of the value India attaches to expanding and improving its education system. Among other things, it highlights the need for internationalisation, calling for example on In­dian universities to set up international offices. Many of the country’s higher education institutions are already first-rate. Furthermore, Indian students account for the lion’s share of international students at German universities, with nearly 50,000 of them enrolled in the 2023/2024 winter semester, according to Wissenschaft weltoffen. With more than 43 million students and 28.5 million pupils at sixth form level, India will continue to offer Germany huge potential for recruiting students from abroad. “One of the tasks of the DAAD is to reach out to gifted individuals nationwide,” explains Katja Lasch. It is clear from the DAAD’s broad-ranging efforts to target universities and students in regions such as Assam in the northeast of the country that such talents are no longer to be found exclusively in well-known megacities such as New Delhi or Mumbai.

The DAAD’s work in India encompasses many different areas. Besides providing funding for individuals, marketing Germany as a country of science and innovation and promoting German studies, one particular focus is on higher education cooper­ation projects. Some of the 40 to 60 projects that are pursued each year are co-funded by various Indian ministries, including for example the Ministry of Education (MoE). One of the flagship programmes is the Programs for Project-Related Personal Exchange run by the DAAD and the Department of Science and Technology, which supports researcher mobility within a bilateral project. The expertise of the DAAD, which is made available in the form of knowledge and country reports, statements on key issues, advice to German universities and the work of the International DAAD Academy (iDA) – which involves for example training higher education staff in “regional competence” – is also in considerable demand. “Germany’s interest in India is growing and there are really a lot of universities and institutions in India that would like to cooperate with Germany.”

With more than 11,500 Indian ­alumnae and ­alumni, activities aimed at maintaining contact with these former students and researchers are very important to facilitate future cooperation. In the “Alumni for Sustainable Development Goals” series of online talks, former DAAD scholarship holders from South and Southeast Asia present their research to a broad-ranging audience.

India was already a self-confident nation 65 years ago: “Even back in the 1960s, India attached great importance to cooperation on an equal footing,” says Katja Lasch. For example, the first agreement between the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), India’s equivalent of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, and the DAAD was already concluded more than 60 years ago. For India there was never any question that exchange must be a two-way process.

Overseen by the DAAD since 2017, the German Centre for Research and Innovation (DWIH) New ­Delhi’s objective is to convey information about the research systems of the two countries and interconnecting stakeholders from both research and in­novation ecosystems. Katja Lasch, who is also the ­Director of the DWIH, explains that international ­scientific and research cooperation, the fight against climate change, and science-based technology transfer are the topics in focus here. It has long been beyond all question that Germany is also keen to ­cooperate with India in the future, says Katja Lasch. “We must cooperate with India! India will overtake Germany in many areas. Indo-German cooperation is already on a solid foundation and we should invest further to maintain and expand it.” —

Related links:

Regional Office in New Delhi

DWIH New Delhi

International DAAD Academy (iDA)