The newspaper acknowledged that China needed to do more to boost ties with India, including in terms of public diplomacy to improve perceptions. “Chinese people lack understanding and respect toward India. They tend to judge it according to ill-conceived preconceptions,” the editorial said.

"In Japan, we do not see poster art anymore and its cultural relevance is fast diminishing," says Yusuke Matsuoka, Director, Arts and Cultural Exchange at the Japan Foundation, who brought the exhibition to India.

The United States is looking to triple the number of Americans going to India for higher studies in the next five years...“That is still far from our goal of 15,000 in five years,” Tara Sonenshine, the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, told the visiting Human Resources and Development Minister in a roundtable earlier this week.

While highlighting the educational opportunities in India, he announced that in 2012, over 1,200 Nigerians studied there, while he expressed hope for an increase. According to him, “Nigerian stakeholders are discovering the attractiveness of Indian education.

India has sought academic collaboration with various US institutions to leverage the full potential of the education sector to meet the increasing needs of both the countries, particularly in the fields of information and technology. "Our academic institutions have been slow to leverage the potential of technology for education. Knowledge networks that link research in the grand challenges of the world have also been slow to develop," Minister of India for human resources development, M Pallam Raju said yesterday.

While a large number of self-financing students come to India every year, experts blame poor diplomacy of high commissions abroad who are entrusted with popularising the scholarship schemes in their respective countries through media and educational bodies. “Bureaucratic approach of our embassies and lack of transparency in the selection process deters common student to apply for these scholarships,” said an office of Indian Foreign Service.

One unheralded Indian success has been last year's establishment of a unified mechanism giving coherence, direction and efficacy to India's foreign aid; that may now amount to well over 0.2 per cent of GDP, if we aggregate all the foreign aid offered through the ministry of external affairs (MEA), and the different agencies that run technical assistance programmes for fellow developing countries. This is a guesstimate, since no one has totalled the real figure.