Overview
- Union Education Minister Pralhad Joshi and France’s higher education minister Philippe Baptiste met in New Delhi to agree priorities for deeper cooperation in education, research and innovation.
- They said they will push to expand student, faculty and researcher mobility and to revise the Mutual Recognition of Qualifications agreement to make degrees easier to accept across both countries.
- The ministers named SPARC, GIAN and the Franco‑Indian Campus in Life Sciences & Health as channels to scale joint research and institutional partnerships.
- India invited French universities to explore branch campuses in India, including in GIFT City and at sites tied to French industry, while a proposal to explore an IIT campus in Nice was discussed as an idea without specified approvals, institutions or timelines.
- Officials said technical negotiations and implementation planning will follow, building on India’s recent moves to host foreign campuses and past overseas IIT projects that offer a model for how approvals, programs and local hiring might be structured.