Start here · A reader’s guide
How to use the grades.
MBAindia.org scores the six ways management education is sold in India — and deliberately nothing else. Before you open a single ranking, give this page five minutes: what a grade can settle for you, the three things we will not put a grade on, and the order in which the rest of the site earns your time.
- 6
- routes we grade
- 25%
- heaviest weight: outcomes
- 2,877
- institutions listed, none scored
- 3
- institution pages, all disclosed
What a grade settles — and what it never could
Every grade on this site attaches to a route: a category defined by who signs the award, how the teaching is delivered, and which regulator’s entitlement, if any, stands behind it. Categories have structure, and structure can be compared without guesswork. A private university’s online degree and an open university’s distance degree differ in ways that hold true whichever campus you pick — that is the layer we score.
Six criteria produce each score, on weights we publish rather than imply: career outcomes carry the most at 25 per cent, recognition the least at 10. If those weights strike you as wrong, good — the method page exists so you can quarrel with it precisely instead of vaguely.
Used properly, a grade answers exactly one question: given your money and your constraints, which category of programme returns the most. It will not tell you whether one particular college is teaching well this year. Nothing published at this distance honestly could, which brings us to the refusals.
Three things this site refuses to grade
A grading site is defined as much by what it declines to score as by what it scores. Our three standing refusals:
2,877 of them sit in our directory with locations and approvals attached — and no scores. Attaching a number to each would mean publishing invented precision about real organisations, so the directory stays a directory.
The disclosure, in one line: this site's network operates its own programmes jointly with IICT (in longhand: the Indian Institute of Commerce and Trade) and IIPM (the Indian Institute of Pharmaceutical Marketing), both of Lucknow, so a grade from us would be a verdict on ourselves. They get plain-statement pages instead, linked below.
No score can read the recruitment notification, promotion policy or PhD ordinance that governs your next step. Where a document in your life names a degree, settle that before any grade — our page on the distinction is where to do it.
Read the site in this order
Six stops. Most readers only need the first three; the rest are there for when the shortlist gets serious.
The 2026 grades
The six routes ranked, verdicts attached. Come out of it holding two candidate routes, not one — the second exists to keep the first honest.
Degree or diploma?
The distinction that decides more cases than any score does, and the short list of situations in which only one of the two will serve.
What a fee actually covers
Per-semester figures, exam charges and certificate costs have a habit of surfacing after commitment. Read this before paying anyone — our partners included.
How we grade
The six criteria, their weights, and what cannot move a grade. This is the page to argue with; the grades are only its output.
The guides
Seven longer explainers — eligibility, entrance exams, admission, real costs, modes compared, choosing a specialisation, and whether an MBA is worth it at all.
The directory
Once you know which route you are shopping in, 2,877 institutions by city and state to shop it in.
The three institution pages
Only three named institutions have pages of their own here, each on its own clearly flagged subdomain. Two belong to partner institutes of this network; the third is the university whose distance degree one of those partners teaches for. None of the three carries a grade — partnership obliges more transparency, not less.
Swami Vivekanand Subharti University
The distance MBA this Meerut university awards over two years: UGC entitlement behind the degree, NAAC A accreditation, ₹65,000 all told, two specialisations rather than one — and its limits stated rather than smoothed over.
iict.mbaindia.orgIICT, Lucknow
What the institute’s autonomous diploma is actually good for, situation by situation — including the degree-gated situations where the honest answer is no.
iipm.mbaindia.orgIIPM, Lucknow
The pharmaceutical-sector sister institute: management education for pharma and healthcare careers, where the “MBA” on the masthead is a diploma at masters level, the institute’s own rather than a university’s.
Why these pages exist: a reader deciding about a partner of ours deserves the same bluntness as a reader deciding about anyone else — arguably more. Each page states what the award is, who signs it, and who should walk away.