Indians may continue to top the tally of student visa grants but they are beginning to show signs of being put off applying to UK universities amid greater migration curbs, the latest Home Office statistics revealed.

The Home Office data for the past year until June 2024 shows a 23 per cent fall in Indian students coming to the UK for higher studies, even as they continue to represent the largest group granted leave to remain on the Graduate Route visa which allows foreign students to work in Britain for two years after their degree.

This fall in Indian student numbers is the first indication of the impact of tighter curbs on the right of most student visa holders to bring along dependent family members, which came into effect earlier this year.

There were 110,006 sponsored study visa grants to main applicants who were Indian nationals in the year ending June 2024 (25 per cent of the total), 32,687 fewer than the previous year, the Home Office statistics reveal.

Most of the increase in foreign students between 2019 and 2023 were from Indian and Nigerian nationals, but numbers for these nationalities have fallen in the latest year (by 23 per cent and 46 per cent respectively), it notes.