Ahmedabad, Nov 14: A bill most likely to be passed by the Australian Parliament this December is expected to have wide ramifications for Indians wishing to migrate Down Under for studies.
“The Education Services for Overseas Students Amendment (Re-Registration of Providers and Other Measures) Bill 2009” — passed by the Australian House of Representatives — is presently awaiting Senate ratification.
It targets Australia’s little-regulated private education providers, which by some estimates make up roughly 70 percent of the education system.
If passed, the bill will make it mandatory for all private education providers to re-register themselves and declare their agents overseas — a huge chunk of whom operate in India.
According to the bill, the purpose of re-registration is “to restore consumer confidence in the quality of education services provided across the entire international system”. Re-registration will be open to only those institutes “that have genuine purpose and demonstrated capacity to provide quality education”.
There are around one lakh Indian students in Australia, mostly from Gujarat, Delhi and Hyderabad. A majority of them enrol with private service providers for vocational courses (from pastry-making to hair-dressing) for attaining permanent residency.
But those familiar with the situation say these institutes often do not have the necessary infrastructure. “For example, the first thing an institute offering a pastry-making course needs is a kitchen. But many of them operate from existing bakery shops and so on,” said Siddique Panwala, an advocate at the Supreme Court of New South Wales, who also works with the Indian Australian Association for Films and Arts.
The other provision of the bill that will make it mandatory for providers to declare their agents is aimed at curbing the proliferation of “unscrupulous agents who mislead students and encourage them to cheat the system,” said Jamal Qureshi, South Asia Marketing Manager of Perth Education City, an educational cluster funded by the state of Western Australia.
He said that under the provisions of the bill, agents who are not affiliated to the Association of Australian Education Representatives in India (AAERI) will face the possibility of being blacklisted.
Panwala said that such agents receive five to 25 per cent commission from private education providers they represent, and so charge Indian students a little for their services “because it has become a lucrative business”.
Dharmendra Patel, founder-director of Auzziz Migration and Education Consultants, Ahmedabad, said there are at least 500 such agents in the country, each with multiple sub-agents.
But according to Ritika Rawal, a senior counsellor at the Ahmedabad-based Akshar Education, which has direct links to about “25-30 private Australian education providers”, the number of students wishing to study in Australia has dropped to “almost zero” since the media-hype about the attacks on Indian students.
If the bill is passed, it is likely to have ramifications on the spate of attacks on Indian students as well. The number of Indian students working late at night or in part-time jobs to meet the living costs, will reduce. Working till late night and living in suburbs make them easy targets for miscreants.
According to Qureshi, most of the victims have been students who landed in Australia with the help of agents who promise easy permanent residence permits. These students then often violate Australian laws which state that student visa holders cannot work for more than 20 hours per week, said Patel.
But the new law has some sceptics as well. Patel added that affiliation to AAERI per se would not solve the problem, as many education consultants who are already affiliated to the body are not competent enough in the first place. “The Australian Government thinks this is the solution, but it really depends on how strict AAERI is with its members,” he added.
–Agencies