The UK Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, is to sponsor the college which will teach Britons to become chefs specialising in Indian food, like pakodas, in a bid to combat shortage of Asian chefs due to the latest immigration rules, The Guardian reported.

In fact, the Curry College is an answer to the crisis in the 3.2 billion pounds curry industry triggered by UK’s Home Office’s ban on bringing in chefs from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, the report said.

The scheme is in line with the latest government policy to make deep cuts in immigration numbers on the basis “that we do not need to attract people to do jobs that could be carried out by British citizens given the right training and support”.

Pickles’s curry college scheme falls under the heading of “increasing social mobility”.

An early paper for the “integration and tolerance working group”, entitled ‘Creating the
Conditions for Integration’, says: “The Indian restaurant sector has already approached the government to explore how they can be supported to recruit and train British workers.

Changes must come from the sector but the government will work with them to identify barriers and short-term support.”

Paul Goodman, a former Tory shadow communities minister, and executive editor of Conservativehome website, said that the curry college plan was “very Eric Pickles”.

“He (Pickles) has a dream: namely to set up a curry college. It combines border control with foreign cooking. It would both help satisfy the apparently inexhaustible appetite for onion bhajis and prawn biriyanis while also providing justification for the squeeze on visas,” he said.