There is a March Monday morning in Mohali I keep returning to.
A twenty-three-year-old woman, an engineering graduate with an IELTS band of 7.5, sat across the table from her father and asked a question neither of us could answer easily: “Papa, if Canada has shut doors, where do I go?”
Indian student departures peaked at 9.08 lakh in 2023, fell to 7.7 lakh in 2024, and dropped further to 6.26 lakh in 2025, a 31% decline in two years, as per Bureau of Immigration data placed before the Rajya Sabha by the Union education ministry in February 2026. Chandigarh recorded the highest per-capita student migration in the country — with 10,150 departures per lakh residents between January 2016 and February 2021, according to Bureau of Immigration data cited in Parliament by the MEA (2021). Punjab followed at 869 per lakh, ahead of Delhi (851), Andhra Pradesh (524), and Kerala (331). At its peak, Punjab supplied a disproportionate share of the 4.27 lakh Indian students enrolled in Canadian institutions. So, when Canadian student visa applications from India fell from roughly 20,900 in August 2023 to just over 4,500 in August 2025 — an almost 80% contraction, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) What this demands of Punjab’s families is a mindset shift as significant as the policy shift itself.
Because a relative lives there, apply, and hope —no longer serves anyone well, the old approach — pick a country. That formula has broken. Punjab absorbed this shock more than almost anywhere else in India. The study-work-PR pathway built around Canada’s PGWP is not returning in its old form, and families still chasing it are chasing a route that has narrowed dramatically. (The writer is president of Mohali-based Association of Licensed Immigration and Education Consultants. Views expressed are personal)
