As per the Nation’s official immigration statistic, Indian students constituted the largest group of foreign students studying in UK. According to the reportsreleased on Thursday, it outstripped the number of Chinese students studying in UK with a hike of 273% in visas granted over the past few years.

Indians continued to be the top nationality granted visas in the skilled worker category along with 56,042 granted work visas in the past year, according to the UK Home Office Data collected by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). “Chinese nationals were the second most common nationality granted sponsored study visas in the year ending September 2022, with 1,16,476 visas granted to main applicants, 2 per cent fewer than the number seen in 2019 (1,19,231),” Home Office said.

To allow international students to stay and work at the end of their degree through the new Graduate Route visa introduced in July last year,  was also dominated by Indians which accounted for 41% of visas granted. The High Potential Individual (HPI) visa is for the brightest graduates from the world’s top universities to work in UK, which aggregates to14% grant to Indian nationals despite no Indian university being on the approved set of top global universities.

Indian, Nigerian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi nationals are now more than three times higher than they were in 2019 which is considered as the major reason behind UK’s immigration figures hitting record levels over the past year.