46 per cent drop in Indian students application: Australia

Natasha Chaku

Melbourne, Jan 7 (PTI) Hit by international student
attack crisis, Australia has experienced a huge decline by 46
per cent of Indians applying for student visas in the country
last year, country's Immigration Department has said.

The total number of student visa applications around
the world also dropped by over 20 per cent.

Department's spokesman Sandy Logan said racism and
violence issue against foreign students were not mainly to be
blamed for the slide in visa applications.
It was also due to stricter and tougher scrutiny of
applications and the immigration department has been rejecting
a higher number of applications from India, he said.
"It is correct to say that there has been a decline
in the number of student visa applications coming from India,"
he said.
There's also been a decline though in the number of
student visas applications that have been withdrawn by those
applicants. In August last year the government announced
strengthened checking for high-risk segments of the student
visa programme.
"It was a targeted series of checks as a result of
analysis which suggested the risk was most significant in
India, Mauritius, Nepal, Brazil, Zimbabwe and Pakistan.
Once integrity checking is taken into account a
student visa application has been refused," he said.
Logan further said, "We are aware that there has been an
effect across the board as a result of the global financial
crisis," he said.
"But we were also expecting that with greater and more
stringent integrity checks, the student visa application
cohort from a number of these countries will drop."
Meanwhile, founder and director of International
Education Consultants Australia, Kathryn Richardson, said
adverse publicity of violent incidents involving foreign
students in Australia cannot be ruled out as a factor.
"Of course you would expect there would be some sort of
response to that. I don't fear, at this stage, that it is
something that will be in the long run a dramatic and constant
change,"
"But if the numbers fall off this year due partly to
publicity or bad publicity, it probably wouldn't be
surprising," Logan said. PTI NC
SKT