Subharti’s MBA: who awards it, and who teaches it

The one distinction this page exists to make

Everything on this site turns on a single question: who is empowered to award the thing you will be holding at the end? On most programmes the answer is uninteresting, because the body that teaches you is also the body that signs the certificate. Here it is not. Swami Vivekanand Subharti University awards the degree. The Indian Institute of Commerce and Trade teaches for it. Neither does the other’s job, and confusing the two is how people end up disappointed by a qualification that was never going to be what they assumed.

What the university contributes

The award itself, and the standing that comes with it. Swami Vivekanand Subharti University is a university at Meerut, accredited NAAC A, and the MBA it offers in distance and online mode is a UGC-entitled degree granted by the university. That sentence is doing all the work: it means the certificate is a degree rather than a diploma, that the name on it is the university’s, and that the instrument belongs to the category which written rules normally name.

It also means the usual check applies, and you should run it rather than take it from us. Entitlement comes programme by programme, mode by mode and intake year by intake year, and it lapses. Ask the university for the entitlement letter naming your programme, your mode and your year of admission. That single document settles more than any brochure, and it is the one prospective students least often request.

What IICT contributes

The teaching, and only the teaching. IICT is an autonomous institute in Lucknow, registered under the Societies Registration Act 1860 and running since 1997. On the Subharti programme it functions as the distance learning centre: it delivers instruction, mentors students and provides study support through the two years. It does not sign the degree and has never suggested it does.

Separately, on its own programmes, IICT grants diplomas in its own name. They are institute awards rather than UGC degrees — UGC purview stops short of them — and the institute is straightforward about that. Keep the two streams apart in your head: an IICT diploma is a different instrument from a Subharti degree, and where a rule names a degree, a diploma does not satisfy it — something we say about every institute on this site, including our own programme.

One more thing gets misread often enough to be worth naming. Amity University holds an academic memorandum of understanding with IICT. That is a collaboration between two institutions. It does not produce a student qualification, it has no bearing on what Subharti awards, and if you ever see it presented as a joint or dual award, the source is wrong.

A society teaching for a university is not an oddity

People sometimes react to “registered society” as though it were a warning label. It is worth remembering what the most sought-after management education in India was operating under until very recently. The IIMs ran as societies on this very register until 2018, when the IIM Act came into force — and through all those decades the credential each of them conferred was a PGDM, a post-graduate diploma rather than a degree. Nobody at the time treated an IIM award as second-rate, and nobody does now.

On this programme the point is narrower still, because IICT is not the awarding body at all. The society teaches; the university awards. If you were going to worry about anything here, worry about the entitlement letter and the total fee, not about the legal form of the institute running your classes.

The programme, in this site’s own terms

The whole programme is priced at ₹65,000 across its two years. On the three fee territories we set out on the home page, that sits inside the first band — under a lakh, where what you are buying is the curriculum and the credential rather than heavy live delivery. Judge it on that basis and ask what teaching contact actually exists before you form an expectation.

It is a dual specialisation MBA: you take two streams rather than one. The streams available are Marketing, Strategic Management, Human Resource Management, Operations Management and Finance. Four of those map onto the specialisation streams we write up in full, so you can read what the papers usually contain before committing. The fifth is worth a note of its own — Strategic Management appears in the core map we publish as MB-302, a compulsory capstone paper. Here it is offered as a full specialisation stream — what that version actually contains is for the university to say, not for us to guess.

The core of an Indian MBA is broadly the same wherever you study it. Our full syllabus — 14 papers, 51 credits — is published free precisely so you can read it before paying anyone. Where curricula genuinely diverge is in the specialisation papers, so those are the ones to request from the university in writing.

Where this qualification helps, and where it does not

• Rules that name a degree. Government recruitment, PhD admission, an HR policy that specifies a master’s degree — this is a university degree, which is the instrument those rules mean. Confirm entitlement for your mode and your year, then it holds.
• Rules that name full-time or regular study. No distance MBA satisfies those, and this one is no exception. If your employer or a recruitment notice says regular, stop here.
• Evaluation abroad. A university degree is the easier of the two instruments to put through a foreign credential evaluation, because the assessing body is looking for a recognised degree-awarding institution. We map how that process works in 104 countries.
• An IICT diploma instead. A different instrument, and it will not satisfy any rule that names a degree. If a degree is what you need, the degree is what you should enrol for.
• Anything about teaching quality. We cannot tell you, and neither can anyone else without data. We do not rank institutions on dimensions we cannot verify.

One checkable data point — and what it is not

Hard outcome data barely exists in this corner of the market, so the one item you can check for yourself deserves precise handling rather than embellishment. The item is Girish Kousgi, who leads IIFL Home Finance as MD & CEO and previously occupied the same chair at PNB Housing Finance. The qualification attributed to him is a diploma in Business Administration at executive master’s level, taken at IICT — and where that attribution sits is what makes it citable: the statutory annual reports PNB Housing Finance filed across three consecutive years, FY22–23 through FY24–25. Filed documents, not marketing copy, which is why it can be quoted at all.

Now the caveats, because they matter more than the item. That is a diploma from IICT’s own programmes, not the Subharti degree described on this page. And a single career is not evidence of typical outcomes. What it establishes is that the institute has existed long enough, and is known widely enough, for its award to surface in a listed company’s filings — and nothing beyond that. It says nothing about what your own two years will produce.

The employer base recorded against IICT alumni runs to Tata, HDFC, the Indian Army, ICICI and Reliance — Indian corporates and the public sector. Read that as a description of where people have worked, not as a placement statistic, because it is not one and nobody has audited it.