France aims to train 5 lakh international students by 2025: Minister

NEW DELHI: France aims to host and train 5 lakh international students by 2025, Jean-Noël Barrot, the country's minister for digital transition and telecommunications, said here on Friday.

Barrot made the comments during his visit to the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi (IIIT-Delhi) to explore Indo-France collaborations. "France opens its system of higher education and research to talented scientific and innovative minds from all over the world so that by 2025, we would reach the objective of hosting and training 5,00,000 international students," Barrot said.

The minister said, "4,00,000 are already there and the number of Indian students would then be, according to President Emmanuel Macron's vision, 20,000," Barot said. "IIIT Delhi is involved in our project of a new Franco-Indian Campus on Health that shall be operational from next year, partnering here with the University of Nice in France in the field of computational biomedicine, together with the most famous French research institutes in these fields that are INRIA (National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology), INSERM (National Institute of Health and Medical Research) and CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research)," he added.

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During the visit, students and faculty of the institute showcased their research projects. The showcase comprised a number of exciting projects like the Autonomous Last Mile Vehicle (ALIVE), Autonomous Precision Landing of Drone, Real-world AI for Healthcare, E-Sahayatri - Your travel buddy, Smart and sustainable mobility, Vision for Wildlife, Facial Image Retrieval using Similarity-Driven Feedback, Federated Automated Deep Learning (FedAutoMoDL) among others.

"France has made international collaboration a priority. This can be seen looking to the international co-publications -- more than 60 per cent of scientific publications are produced with a foreign research organisation. Another indicator are the PhD students: of the 70,000 PhD students doing their PhD in France, 40 per cent come from abroad, placing France on third position worldwide.

"In this landscape, India plays a particular role. In fact, scientific exchanges between our two countries started several centuries ago, and in the history of exchanges, science and technology have become one of the most steadfast and enduring bonds between France and India," he said.