New Delhi, Nov. 8: Uzma Arshad has been waiting two years to enrol in an affordable postgraduate degree programme in business administration in Riyadh that she hopes will help her find a job in India, her homeland.

But the only Indian university operating in Saudi Arabia, the government-run Indira Gandhi National Open University, has been refusing to enrol fresh students at its international centres since early 2014 under a decision taken by a former vice-chancellor who now faces a probe.

Arshad, 26, brought up in Saudi Arabia by her parents who had moved to the country to work, increasingly finds herself being wooed aggressively by a rival institution she does not want to join: Pakistan's Allama Iqbal Open University.

"I just want to join an MBA programme with an Indian university in Riyadh, and I'm really worried because I can't," Arshad, who completed her undergraduate studies from Ignou in Riyadh, said over the phone.

"I'm Indian, why should I have to go to a Pakistani university to get affordable education?"

That quandary isn't hers alone and it is worrying sections of India's foreign policy establishment, which has for years banked on the country's education outreach in its neighbourhood and West Asia to build critical diplomatic capital.

India's missions in the 29 countries where Ignou used to offer programmes have over the past few months been bombarded with complaints by Indian and foreign students demanding the university restart overseas admissions, senior officials confirmed.

A failure to redress their worries quickly could, officials and experts fear, force these students to turn to the affordable distance education programmes offered by universities from Pakistan, Malaysia and even China - a setback for India's soft-power ambitions.

India's apex distance-learning university this month obtained government approvals to restart admissions in 2016 at nine of the 84 centres where Ignou courses were taught abroad. But the students' patience is wearing thin, officials said, and time is running out.

"There is recognition within the government that it is taking too long to redress these concerns, and students are going to other institutions instead," Ignou's acting vice-chancellor, Nageshwar Rao, told The Telegraph. "We are aware of this problem."

Over 7 million Indians work in West Asia, a statistic that has - along with oil -long shaped New Delhi's foreign policy towards the region. Many of these expatriates maintain strong ties with India, where they send remittances worth millions of dollars each year.

About two decades ago, New Delhi had recognised the potential of quality, affordable education as a major soft diplomacy weapon in both West Asia and India's immediate neighbourhood.

It was under then Indian ambassador Talmiz Ahmad in 2003 that New Delhi began offering distance education programmes in BEd, BBA, MA and MBA in Saudi Arabia, through collaboration between Ignou and the Riyadh-based Educational Consulting and Guidance Services run by Riaz Mulla, an Indian.

It's a model India has followed in every country that requires a local partner to deliver the course content that Ignou provides according to standards set by the Indian university.

By early 2014, over 15,000 students had graduated from Ignou's centres in Riyadh, Jeddah and Dammam in Saudi Arabia, and another 4,500 were enrolled.

But that year, Mulla and the other heads of Ignou's partner institutions in 29 countries received a decree from the Indian university saying they could not admit fresh students. It marked the start of domestic bureaucratic tussles in India that, officials said, would hurt internationally.

The Ignou vice-chancellor at the time, Mohammed Aslam, argued that the agreements the university had inked with these partners - some more than a decade earlier - violated a 1997 amendment to the law under which the university had been created.

That amendment required that the Visitor to Ignou -- the President of India -- approve every new overseas centre before it began operations.

Aslam asked the Union human resource development ministry to conduct a "comprehensive review" of all the overseas centres. But when the government, while conducting the review, asked him to maintain status quo with the existing overseas programmes, Aslam went ahead and ordered a ban on fresh admissions.

That decision triggered a government probe against Aslam that is still on. His supporters claim he is being victimised for following the law, while critics argue that he deviated from government orders and ignored the fallout of his move for India's education diplomacy.

Aslam, who has challenged the probe in Delhi High Court, declined comment on the case.

It took two years - spanning the final months of the UPA government and the first year of its NDA successor -for a course correction to begin, with Rao seeking the first few approvals to restart admissions at the overseas centres.

But the long uncertainty continuing in most of the nations where Ignou admitted students till 2013 has already taken a toll on the students.

Kathmandu's Ashim Thapa, who squeezed in his undergraduate studies with Ignou between treks he leads in Nepal, wants to sharpen his academic understanding of travel and tourism through a postgraduate programme the university offered till 2014.

"But my friends and I have just been waiting, and are now exploring other university options," Thapa said. "It's sad because Ignou enjoys the best reputation among the universities in Nepal and would have been our first choice."

Several Ignou professors and partner institutions had foreseen this crisis, said Biswajit Mukherjee, chairman of the International Centre for Academics, which is among the biggest distance education platforms in Nepal.

"But we had no option but to do as we were told to by Ignou," Mukherjee said.

Like the students, partner institutions such as Mulla's have found themselves being wooed by Ignou's rivals like the Allama Iqbal University and Malaysia's Wawsan University. In August this year, Mulla wrote to Rao about the two universities "approaching" him.

"Being an Indian, why should we promote other countries' universities?" Mulla asked in an email to Rao. "We have established the name of Ignou in Saudi Arabia for so many years."

It's a message the government has heard, Rao said. Ignou, he said, has written to all the partner institutions seeking details it needs to draw up fresh tie-up agreements that will allow fresh enrolment abroad.

But the process could take time, he conceded. Till then, Arshad can't count on her country, India, for her higher education in Riyadh.