Study Abroad: NORKA Roots has insured 3,000 Kerala students pursuing overseas education

NEW DELHI: The Kerala Government’s Non-Resident Keralites’ Affairs department (NORKA) was launched in 1996 to provide support to people migrating from the state to other countries but its work with students leaving to study abroad began during the covid pandemic. NORKA Roots, a public sector undertaking, was set up to run the department’s schemes. K Harikrishnan Namboothiri, CEO, NORKA Roots, spoke to Careers360 about student movement, identity and insurance cards and migration trends. Edited excerpts below.

Q. How many students are registered with NORKA?

A. Close to 3,000 students are currently registered with NORKA because this exercise was started during the COVID pandemic period. We are also providing students’ identification cards to those who are going abroad for education. We are also giving insurance coverage for that card which is valid for three years. The cost of the insurance card is Rs 315.

Q. What does the insurance cover?

A. It has Rs 4 lakh accident insurance coverage and Rs 2 lakh permanent disability coverage. This is something we started in 2020. We have given this card to close to 3,000 students in 58 countries. Now things are slowly moving. We do this annually as we also do attestation of certificates. We are a state-run agency approved by the ministry of education for the attestation of documents. Annually, we work on over 50,000 certificates.

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Q. Certificates for what?

A. We do the attestation for proceeding with the MEA (ministry of external affairs) and respective embassies. These certificates are not only for students, this is applicable to those who are going for employment or business purposes.

Q. How many students were moving out of Kerala to study abroad before covid?

A. I can share with you data on the movement of students from Kerala from 2016 onwards. From 2016, there was a gradual increase in the number of students moving to other countries for higher education. In 2016, 18,428 students moved out of Kerala, and in 2017, 22,093 students moved abroad for studies. In 2018, the number of students who went abroad was 26,456. And in 2019 it was 30,948, and in 2020 – that is, the Covid year – 15,277 students moved out. I have the data for 2021 only till the month of February which was 5,040.

Q. What led to the start of this initiative in 1996?

A. At that time people used to go abroad mainly for employment – there was always migration from Kerala. A good number of people went to the Gulf countries for business purposes. We believed there needed to be an organisation to provide support and service to those who are migrating to a foreign land. We actually do a lot of programmes before migration, during migration and after migration. We may be the only agency in the world that provides 360-degree service and support in the migration domain or migration management.

We started looking into student migration only in the last three years. During Covid, we realised that a large number of students were moving out of Kerala. We found many student abroad consultants were involved in the student migration. We have migration facilitation centres across Kerala and we also have the NRK (non-resident Keralites) development offices in Chennai, Bengaluru, Delhi and Bombay.

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Q. Have you had students being deported like other states? How did you handle that?

A. If there is an issue we will address that, and we will immediately take up the matter with the Indian Embassy in the respective foreign destination. We also have the diaspora network with whom we will connect with that in layer-two. There were incidents where we involved both the Embassy and the Kerala diaspora association.