On the day that Indians start voting in the world's biggest general election, the country's future is at the forefront of everyone's thoughts. A tiny part of that future might just have been shaped by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, who yesterday flew home after an 11-day tour of Delhi, Chennai and Mumbai, bringing western classical music to the cities in the form of concerts, workshops, school visits and masterclasses.

India is a country with an enormously rich and deep-rooted tradition of its own classical music. While western classical music is far from unknown – Nehru was a fan, Calcutta has a well-established western classical music club and there are amateur orchestras both there and in Mumbai – it sounds as different to many Indians' ears as their own music does to ours, and opportunities to hear and learn it are relatively rare.

For Gavin Reid, director of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the tour has been first and foremost about cultural exchange. "This was always meant to be a two-way street. It was never about us coming to India and simply presenting."

Education work has been at the heart of their visit – for performers and audiences alike; 13 students from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland auditioned to join the professional orchestra for the 11 days, and two further RCS film students got the opportunity to come along too, to make a documentary about it. Reid estimates that 10,000 schoolchildren attended workshops in the three cities that offered a friendly and entertaining introduction to different sections of the orchestra presented by the ever-game BBCSSO musicians. There's been outreach work in each city's local musical community, and in Mumbai, soloist Nicola Benedetti and a quartet of the RCS students travelled to a public school an hour north of the city to play to groups of seven-year-olds in a tiny classroom where temperatures must have reached 40C.

The reaction of both musicians and audiences has been extraordinary. Every musician I talked to – I joined the tour for the final few days in Mumbai – has found the experience hugely inspiring and positive. "It's been the tour of a lifetime.... it's been the most wonderful privilege to play here," says second violin Alex Gascoigne.

Glasgow-based composer and conductor James MacMillan told the cheering audience at the close of Sunday night's Mumbai concert: "We have been transformed by our visit."

"My musicians have loved it," said Reid. "Most of them have never been before. I thought it would be a life-changer for many of them, and I think it has indeed opened their eyes to a whole new world that that they might have heard of, but they've been able to live and breathe it for these last few days.

"We're not the first UK orchestra to come here, I know, but the ambition and the reach of this tour is unprecedented," Reid added. "We've made so many friends. Every piece, every response has been 'We want more of this; this is a rare event.' I don't wish to give the impression that I think there's about to be a flood and they're just waiting for us, but there are pockets of interest and enthusiasm, and we could certainly have gone to other cities."

India's first professional symphony orchestra was established less than a decade ago. The greatest problem the Symphony Orchestra of India faces is finding homegrown musicians. Currently, only a handful of the Mumbai-based ensemble's 90 players are Indian – but that's a huge improvement already on eight years ago when that figure was zero, says Philip Sizer, the SOI's general manager. Another challenge is the lack of concert halls. Mumbai has the new and elegant National Centre for the Performing Arts (the orchestra's base) but few other cities have venues that can house a symphony orchestra, while practicalities that a western orchestra takes for granted – 50-plus music stands, say – might well be missing. "We need time to build the audience, widen the base," says Sizer.

Khursheed Khurody teaches the piano in Mumbai but trained in the UK. She says her student list is steadily increasing, but "partly that's to do with keeping up with the Joneses". Without the infrastructure – from teachers, to examiners, to instrument manufacturers – piano tuners, even, western classical music will struggle to become anything more than a tiny minority interest. At a question and answer session before Sunday's concert, one young Indian student put the problem in stark terms: "It's far easier to buy the child a cello than it is to find a cello teacher."

"We'd like to think we've left a small footprint," said Reid. "It's a snowball effect. The more activity we can provide, the more there will be." As Glasgow prepares to welcome every Commonwealth country – not least India – to the city for this summer's Commonwealth Games, Reid and Royal Conservatoire principal John Wallace promise that this is only the beginning of a cultural exchange between India and Scotland.

