Over the past decade, Indians have sent an extraordinary ₹1.76 lakh crore abroad to fund the education of students studying overseas, according to data provided by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in response to a Right to Information (RTI) query filed by India Today. This figure highlights the immense financial outflow from the country purely for education purposes and reflects the growing trend of Indian families investing in foreign degrees.
In the financial year 2023–24 alone, students remitted nearly ₹29,000 crore to foreign institutions — only slightly less than the previous year’s peak. By comparison, a decade ago in 2014–15, the total annual outflow for education was just ₹2,429 crore, marking it as the lowest figure in the ten years. The growth since then has been dramatic — with the highest point reached in 2022–23 at ₹29,171 crore — amounting to an almost 1,200% surge over ten years.
To put this in perspective, the sums being spent on overseas education are so vast that they dwarf some of India’s own education infrastructure costs. A 2014 report pegged the cost of establishing a new Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at ₹1,750 crore — a figure that, adjusted for inflation, comes to around ₹2,823 crore in 2025. This means that the total amount remitted abroad for education in the last decade could have financed the creation of roughly 62 IITs, while the 2023–24 outflow alone could have funded over 10 new IIT campuses.
The RBI provided the data in US dollars, which has been converted to rupees using the current exchange rate. However, it also clarified that it does not maintain records on certain specifics, such as the share of transactions handled by banks versus non-bank fintech platforms, the exchange rate markups or hidden charges levied on such remittances, or any studies conducted to measure the financial losses these charges might impose on Indian families.
When it comes to the volume of transactions, records available from 2018–19 onwards show a sharp upward trend. Education-related outward remittances rose from 3.63 lakh transactions in 2018–19 to over 6.05 lakh in 2019–20. There was a slight drop to 6.03 lakh in 2020–21, likely due to pandemic-related travel restrictions, but the numbers quickly rebounded — reaching nearly 8 lakh in 2021–22, then climbing to 9.99 lakh in 2022–23, before settling at 9.43 lakh in 2023–24.
Interestingly, the rise in remittance volumes comes despite a decline in the number of Indian students going abroad in 2024. Government data presented in the Lok Sabha in March, based on Bureau of Immigration (BoI) records, shows 7,59,064 students left the country for higher studies last year — a 15% drop compared to 8,92,989 in 2023. The dip is largely attributed to tighter visa regulations in several countries. However, the 2024 figure still surpasses pre-pandemic levels; in 2019, 5,86,337 students went overseas for education.
When compared to the Indian government’s own spending, the numbers are striking. The Department of Higher Education’s budget allocation for 2025–26 stands at ₹50,077.95 crore, an 8% increase from ₹46,482.35 crore in 2024–25. Yet, the money spent by Indians on overseas education in just the last year — over ₹29,000 crore — is more than half the country’s entire higher education budget. Over the last decade, the amount remitted for studying abroad has been more than three times the government’s annual allocation for higher education.
This decade-long surge in education-related outward remittances raises important policy questions. It underscores the need to address the gap between the aspirations of Indian students and the capacity, quality, and global competitiveness of domestic higher education institutions. Without significant improvements at home, the trend of large-scale financial outflows for overseas studies is unlikely to slow down.
