An estimated 50,000 people from non-European Union countries, including India, are suspected to have exploited lax enforcement of the student visa rules to enter Britain to work while pretending to be students, according to an official report released on Tuesday.
Under a system introduced by the then Labour government in 2009, applicants for student visas must be sponsored by an officially recognised college and they cannot switch colleges without permission.
New rules not yet
But according to the National Audit Office (NAO), the necessary “controls” to enforce the new rules were not put in place allowing thousands to get through the net unchecked. The system was brought in “before the key controls were in place” and “in its first year of operation, between 40,000 and 50,000 individuals may have entered the U.K.... to work rather than to study.”
In what senior Labour MP Margaret Hodge, chairperson of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, described as “one of the most shocking reports of poor management leading to abuse that I have seen,” the report said that the UK Border Agency “did not check that those who entered the U.K. as students were attending college.”
Little action taken
“The agency has taken little action to prevent and detect students overstaying or working in breach of their visa conditions because the agency regards them as low-priority compared to illegal immigrants and failed asylum-seekers,” it added.
The head of NAO, Amyas Morse, said the flaws were “both predictable and avoidable”
Tory Immigration Minister Damian Green said the new government had introduced tougher measures “to stamp out abuse and restore order to the uncontrolled student visa system we inherited.”
“These measures are beginning to bite, we have already seen the number of student visas issued drop considerably in the second half of 2011, compared to the same period in 2010,” he claim

source: http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/article3252313.ece