India’s Congress-led government is undertaking a radical overhaul of the country’s higher education system that will include legislation allowing foreign universities to operate in the country, the human resource development minister said on Monday.

Kapil Sibal, one of the most energetic reformers in the cabinet assembled after May’s parliamentary election, said the administration intends to establish a new legal framework to unshackle India’s universities, currently controlled by a huge, rigid and highly centralised bureaucracy in New Delhi.