Written by Neeraj Mehra.
Image credit: 臺灣獎學金及華語文獎學金計畫 Taiwan Scholarship and Huayu Enrichment Scholarship Program.
In the modern world system, education has turned into one of the key tools of international policy. States are going on to make use of higher education not only to ease student movement, but also to gain a long-term power base, integrate themselves into the worldwide knowledge systems, and control the transfer of technological skills. In the case of Taiwan, where space in diplomacy is limited but technological centrality can hardly be disputed, education diplomacy based on scholarship has become an important policy instrument. On the other hand, India has one of the largest and most technically educated young populations in the world, with a backbone of the most prestigious institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs) and the best central universities. There is a great strategic reasoning in the deep educational engagement between Taiwan and India. However, although a number of well-endowed Taiwan government scholarship programmes are available, the number of Indian universities that are enrolled in them is limited, disjointed and mostly individualised, not institutionalised.
This gap is a paradox that should be policy worthy. Taiwan takes a structural strategic stance in the world technology platform, especially on semiconductors, advanced electronics, high-precision manufacturing, and other study areas. Its universities work in close collaboration with industrial clusters, so academic research may be channelled into applied technological innovation. In the case of India, which has publicly expressed its aspirations in semiconductor production, semiconductor supply chain resiliency, and production-linked digital infrastructure, interaction with the academic infrastructure in Taiwan would provide not only technical education but also tacit knowledge in production cultures and research to industry connections. This type of knowledge cannot be transferred by means of trade agreements or capital investment: it is spread best of all in the form of academic mobility and especially between the faculty and doctoral stages. The lack of formal interaction between the elite universities of India and Taiwanese higher education is hence a strategic lapse and not an outflanking omission.
The scholarship system in Taiwan is composed of well-structured, government-run programmes which are explicitly available to Indian applicants. The MOE Taiwan Scholarship is a scholarship programme organised by the Ministry of Education, which aids full-degree undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral level studies in Taiwanese universities, with full tuition subsidies and monthly allowances. That ministry administers the Huayu Enrichment Scholarship, a 3-month to 12-month Mandarin language course, for use by students, researchers, and faculty members, including those without any Mandarin training. Simultaneously, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs manages the MOFA Taiwan Scholarship that combines academic education with capacity building with a development focus and is open to applicants in South and Southeast Asia (including India). Besides these flagship programmes, Taiwanese universities, including the National Taiwan University and the National Tsing Hua University, have institution-based scholarships, with many of them being tied to STEM fields, and in other instances, tied to industry-driven research efforts. These programmes are very transparent with visible funding, clear-cut eligibility requirements, and low political conditionality and are done in India via Taipei Economic and Cultural Centre (TECC), which operates as a form of formal liaison.
Empirical evidence shows that the Indian participation has increased in absolute terms, but institutionally shallow. In 2024, 137 Indian nationals were given government scholarships by Taiwan, the largest number of Indian recipients receiving the scholarships per year to date, comprising 92 Huayu Enrichment Scholarships and 45 Taiwan Scholarships. These statistics show that the Taiwanese outreach to India is not just symbolic, and Indian students are becoming more sensitive to the opportunities. Yet the structure of this participation is highly limiting in that the vast majority of the participants are individual students applying on their own, instead of applicants nominated, sponsored or targeted by elite academic institutions in India.
The continued existence of this trend is an indicator of institutional failure in Indian higher education and not a problem with the scholarship planning of Taiwan. In contrast to joint ventures with universities in North America or Europe, Taiwan-related opportunities are seldom entrenched in the internationalisation plans of IITs or central universities in India. The majority of the institutions do not have a special unit that will search, spread the information systematically, provide advice to the possible candidates or even negotiate with the Taiwan counterparts through the nomination process. Without such institutional mediation, members of the faculty will be left to negotiate on their own through the foreign application processes, which often lack administrative advocacy and a sense that they may be part of a promotion or appraisal process. Such uncertainty has been a major disincentive in very hierarchical academic settings, especially regarding faculty in mid-career who risk opportunity costs when making international moves.
These institutional barriers are made more complicated by perceptual factors. In Indian academia, Taiwan has mostly been represented as a place of Mandarin language, only sometimes as a place of high-end technological research and innovation. This is a limited view, although Taiwan has proved to be strong in engineering, computer science, materials science and applied physics. Administrative priorities are still influenced by the hierarchies of prestige of North American and European destinations, even in cases when they do not provide as many possibilities of integrating with industrial ecosystems that are directly linked to the development objectives of India. Consequently, Taiwan has frequently been pushed to the margins of elite academic activity and has been viewed as an optional or peripheral partner as opposed to being a strategic node in world-technology networks.
Policy-wise, this under-exploitation is associated with tangible strategy costs. The scholarships of Taiwan are clearly intended as soft power and talent diplomacy, in order to build long-term networks of alumni who are professionally and intellectually connected to Taiwan over their careers. When participation from India’s elite universities remains limited, these networks fail to reach critical mass within the very institutions that shape India’s future scientific and technological leadership. In the case of India, it does not just mean lost investment opportunities, but fewer avenues to the knowledge systems that are at the centre of modern-day technological rivalry. It is also the lack of faculty-level interaction that undermines the stability of bilateral academic relationships since student mobility in and of itself does little to foster the institutional legitimacy or research sustainability that would support long-term cooperation.
Thus, a new scholarship scheme is not necessary in this case. The current architecture of Taiwan is adequate in its scope and size. Institutional recalibration on the Indian side is what is needed. Elite universities need to view Taiwan scholarships as faculty development and research tools, and not as peripheral international interactions. There should be some formal means of identifying relevant programmes, approving candidates and incorporating participation into wider institutional goals. Pathways through which nomination would be standardised in other regions would lead to less uncertainty and denote the institutional commitment. Even faculty-first mobility programmes, especially those that are based on priority areas, like semiconductors and advanced manufacturing, would yield higher and more sustainable payoffs than student-only exchanges. Concurrently, Taiwan scholarship programme alumni are to be organised as mentors and institutional ambassadors, which would help to achieve the correction of the perceptual bias and reduce the barriers to information.
The fact that IITs and other leading Indian universities are underrepresented in the Taiwanese system of scholarship opportunities should thus remain a factor of institutional inertia and perceptual lag and not of structural incompatibility or imperative. Such inertia has long-term strategic consequences in an international structure that is becoming more and more a competition between and among human capital and innovation ecosystems. Taiwan has already put the table on educational resources and scholarship instruments. It remains yet to be seen whether these instruments can be turned into a profound, long-term India-Taiwan academic collaboration, whether Indian institutions are ready to incorporate them into coherent policy and institutional contexts and whether individual mobility can be translated into enduring strategic interaction.
If you are interested in learning more about the topic, please read the author’s other article, “Taiwan-India University Cooperation: Emerging Corridors of Academic Exchange and Technological Diplomacy.”
Neeraj Mehra is currently working as an Assistant to the Director of the Education Division at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Centre in New Delhi.
Taiwan Insight 