International students, including Indians, starting courses at British universities this month will no longer be able to bring family members on all but postgraduate research courses and courses with government-funded scholarships under tougher UK visa norms effective from Monday.
The UK Home Office said the changes, first announced by former home secretary Suella Braverman in May last year, are aimed at clamping down on people using the student visa as a backdoor route to work in the UK and will see an estimated 140,000 fewer people come to the UK.
The tougher rules are geared towards cutting what Home Secretary James Cleverly dubbed as an “unreasonable practice” of overseas students bringing dependants, which official figures show have risen by more than 930 per cent since 2019.