Foreign Students Now Come Under Scanner

By M H Ahssan

Foreign students — enrolled in different institutions in India — are under the police scanner. Their visa details are being scrutinised to find out whether some of them might have overstayed, posing a security risk.

The move has been initiated by the Foreigners Regional Registration Offices (FRROs) through respective state/UT police forces across the country in the wake of the Centre’s direction to weed out overstaying foreign nationals through detailed checks post-Mumbai terror attacks.

“Although it is an ongoing exercise in the case of all foreigners who visit India on valid documents, the idea is to sensitise educational institutions of the problem of overstaying students and its security implications for India,” said a senior home ministry official.

Latest statistics compiled by the home ministry show that there were a total of 28,842 foreign students in the country till December 31, 2007. Delhi has the highest number of such students (7,424). Four other states — Maharashtra (5,551), Tamil Nadu (4,956), Andhra Pradesh (2,289) and West Bengal (1,697) — too have significant numbers.

The country-wise figures of foreign students show that the highest number of students in the country are from USA followed by Sri Lanka, Hungary, Bangladesh, Sudan, Thailand, UK, Kenya, Afghanistan and Malaysia. Incidentally, no Pakistani student was enrolled in the country as on December 31, 2007.

Though the ministry has not come out with any specific figure of overstaying foreign students, the enormity of the problem can be understood by the huge numbers of missing Bangladeshi and Pakistani nationals who have just disappeared while visiting India on short-term visa.

The figure shows that over 62,000 Bangladeshi nationals disappeared after expiry of their visa during 2005-07. The number of missing Bangladeshis (62,547) is, in fact, much higher than the number of Pakistanis (22,097) who had come to India using proper visas and subsequently vanished.

The other foreign nationals who went missing after arrival in 2005, include 11,845 Afghanistanis, 53 Chinese, 208 Japanese, 176 Australians, 1,142 from USA and 411 from UK.

An official explained that all those who might have overstayed or disappeared may not be a security threat, but the enforcement agencies cannot take the risk of ignoring them.