Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will fly to India on Monday to try to capitalise on Australia's fastest-growing education market after it plunged last decade following a series of racially motivated attacks.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The number of Indian students studying in Australia has more than tripled since its low in 2011 and Indian students now contribute more than $2.3 billion to the Australian economy through the higher education, vocational education and school sectors.
But the numbers have not always been so strong.
Between 2008 and 2010 a wave of 152 assaults against Indian students hit the community, culminating in Indian media accusing Victorian Police of acting like the Ku Klux Clan for being unwilling to investigate race as a motivating factor in the stabbing murder of a student, and India's influential Economic Times headlining "Australia, land of racism".
The spate of assaults, 23 of which involved racial overtones, spurred protests of thousands across Australia and halved the number of Indians studying in Australia in one year.
It took five years for the number of students studying in Australia to return to their pre-2010 levels. They have since become our fastest growing source - more than 45,000 studying across Australia in January.
On Friday, Jaideep Mazumdar, who is responsible for Australian affairs at the Indian External Affairs Ministry, said the government no longer had concerns about the safety of Indian students in Australia.
"The Australian government has been extremely proactive with us when we have taken it up with them," Mr Mazumdar said.
Mr Turnbull, who will be joined by Education Minister Simon Birmingham in New Delhi, said on Sunday that education was a key component of his visit.
"India is showing it can grow at a rapid rate; that is offering enormous opportunity for Australia. Our trade with India has a lot of untapped potential," he said before leaving Papua New Guinea. "Education is a very big part of our relationship."
Mr Turnbull said Australia was the most preferred place for foreign education for Indians after the US.
Senator Birmingham said Australia was well placed to help India with its education aspirations, "including its goal of upskilling 400 million people by 2022".
But vice chancellors have been weary of over-exposing themselves to a boom in any one particular market, after learning how quickly demand can following the attacks between 2008 and 2010.
Last year Australian National University's Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington told an ANU council meeting that there was a need to "mitigate potential risk exposure in the event of market downturn," in relation to the Chinese international student market, the largest player in the education sphere which had more than 72,000 students studying in Australia in January.
Other University leaders have also privately acknowledged that over-reliance on any one nationality left them too exposed, an opinion backed by the Grattan Institute's Andrew Norton.
"As a general rule, heavy financial reliance on an international source country does have risks - we saw this with Indian students a few years ago, when bad publicity about crime in Australia, a high dollar and changes to visa rules combined to reduce student numbers," he told Fairfax Media.
"There is also the risk that political factors overseas make it harder for students to travel overseas, or economic problems in their country make foreign education less affordable."
Mr Turnbull will also look to further expand other trade opportunities in India, Australia's fifth-largest trading partner, with two-way trade ramping up to $19 billion in 2016 as India looks to become the world's third-largest economy in the next 15 years.
Uranium and coal exports and opening up labour mobility, particularly for IT workers, are also expected to be on the agenda in New Delhi and Mumbai.
