No fall in Indian students' in Australia

Updated on: Monday, September 07, 2009

Chennai: Australian deputy prime minister and education minister Julia Gillard, who is on a five-day visit to the country to strengthen bilateral cooperation in the field of education, said on Thursday that the attacks on some Indian students there had not affected enrolment of Indian students in Australian educational institutions.

"We have not seen any reduction in the number of students enrolling in Australia," Gillard, who visited New Delhi before coming to the city, told a press conference here. Parents were understandably concerned about the safety of their children studying in Australia, but the country remained "safe, welcoming and multi-cultural", she said. More than 100,000 Indian students were studying in Australia, she added.

She said Australia showed zero tolerance' towards racial attacks and policing had been stepped up in Melbourne and Sydney, the two cities where the incidents took place.

In a related measure to preserve the quality of education in private institutions that enrolled international students, the country would soon require private education providers to re-register themselves. "They will be registered again only if they meet high quality standards," she said.

Gillard said she had met Union HRD minister Kapil Sibal and decided that there would be an annual ministerial dialogue between the two countries. Asked about the possibility of Australian universities setting up their campuses in India, she said there was a strong degree of collaboration between Indian and Australian universities. Australian universities indeed had experience in running overseas campuses, while India was working on how to meet its growing educational demands. "Clearly, the question of regulating foreign educational institutions is in the hands of India."

Earlier, she led a delegation to IIT-Madras to sign agreements on education and research collaboration in the field of information technology security. Cyber security formed the highlight of discussions between policy makers, academics and technical experts from India and Australia, as they came together for a joint Indo-Australia IT security workshop.?

Elaborating on a current project on protecting critical infrastructure from denial of service' attacks, Professor S V Raghavan from the department of computer science engineering, at IIT-Madras said, "This began as an informal relationship in 2005 when we began working with the Australian High Commission. The areas of cryptography and internet security were opening up around the world at the time.

Service attacks on critical infrastructure could lead to disabling of electricity or water supply. "As these attacks take place at high speeds, we need to find out how to capture packets (of data) at high speeds, classify and understand them. A number of technologies can be used for this, but we need a policy framework for all this to operate." The results observed from this project would be sent as reports to policy-makers in the respective governments, he added. The project is being carried out by IIT-Madras, Queensland University of Technology and the Chennai-based Society for Electronic Transactions and Security (SETS).

No fall in Indian students' in Australia

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