OTTAWA — India’s ambassador to Ottawa says Canadians must rebuild their country’s image as a destination for bright minds, lamenting that a number of foreign students have died after being exploited at home .
High Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma argued in a lecture at the Montreal Council on International Relations (Corim) that exploitation of foreign students undermines the role Indian students play in Canada in helping both countries advance their technological knowledge .
Canada’s international student program has come under scrutiny recently after a surge in visas in recent years led the federal government to impose an admissions cap on educational institutions for the next two years.
Last year, there were more than a million international students in Canada, and India is the main Source of these students.
But Mr Verma says there are fake educational institutions that have “misled” Indian families, sometimes with tragic consequences. He even claims that some Indian students died after being exploited, without specifying whether he was referring to deaths by suicide.
He declared at the CORIM conference on Tuesday afternoon that the stakes are enormous for these foreign students.
“Several come from poor families; their parents are ready to sell their land, their farm and their animals for them to come here. And when they are misled by dishonest educational institutions, it creates a real cataclysm in India,” said High Commissioner Verma.
“At one point, we were sending [en Inde] an Indian foreign exchange student every 10 days in a body bag. And as an ambassador, you can imagine how I felt then.”
Canadian universities and colleges have turned to recruiting international students to fill the funding gap from provincial governments. But this strong recruitment comes at the expense of students desperate to come to Canada, who often take out loans or rely heavily on their families to pay for their studies.
The Canadian Press reported last week that at Conestoga College in Kitchener, Ontario, several foreign students work full time to make ends meet.
Meanwhile, students who cannot find work worry about their financial situation; some even question their decision.
A Sikh temple in Surrey, British Columbia, reported earlier this year that it was aware of the deaths of more than three dozen Indian students in Canada since 2021, the majority from drug overdoses.
High Commissioner Verma said on Tuesday that he encouraged Indian students who have been living in Canada for a year or two to use social media to explain the real challenges they face and focus on how they overcame these problems.
“These videos are circulating on various social networks (…) and many Indian parents have learned lessons from them,” he said.
Verma added that this outreach needs to be done in multiple languages because parents “have the power to decide whether the student will come to Canada” and need a realistic idea of what their child will face.
“The ‘Canada brand’ has a bad reputation in education,” he admitted, saying Canadians need to restore their country’s reputation as a good place to study.
