We have argued that under ₹1 lakh, programmes are close to interchangeable on paper. Swami Vivekanand Subharti University’s distance MBA is priced there. So the honest case for it has to be made somewhere other than on paper.
Every few weeks the same question arrives in slightly different words. Swami Vivekanand Subharti University, Meerut. NAAC A. Distance MBA. ₹65,000 for the whole thing. Is it real, and will it count for what I need?
The first half of that is easy and we can settle it in a paragraph. The second half is worth the rest of this page, because it does not actually depend on the university. It depends on what you intend to do with the degree — and most people have never written that down.
The MBA is a university-awarded degree, UGC-entitled, delivered in distance and online mode. Subharti awards it. That matters because the instrument is what survives the next twenty years: not a certificate, not a diploma, a degree in your name from a university.
The fee is ₹65,000 for the two years, stated as one total rather than semester by semester. In our piece on what each fee band actually buys we noted that fee disclosure is worst in the ₹1–2 lakh band, where the advertised number is frequently per semester and the examination charges arrive later. A quoted two-year total is the better behaviour. Ask for it in writing anyway, in our standard form: what is the total I will pay from admission to holding my certificate?
NAAC A is a real signal and it is worth having. It also grades the university as an institution. It is not a statement about how one distance programme is run week to week. Read it as evidence about the awarding body, not about your Tuesday evenings.
One vocabulary warning, because we have written a whole piece on it: do not accept “UGC approved” from anyone as an answer. What you want is entitlement, and entitlement attaches to a named programme, in a named mode, for named sessions.
The teaching half of this programme sits with IICT of Lucknow — the initials expand to Indian Institute of Commerce and Trade — whose job is the learning centre’s: the classes, the mentoring, the study support. Subharti awards the degree and holds the entitlement. Those are two separate jobs and the separation is not cosmetic. Your degree will say Swami Vivekanand Subharti University on it.
This is where the interesting part of the argument sits. If programmes under ₹1 lakh really are close to interchangeable on paper — and we think they are — then the paper is not the variable. The paper here is fixed: a university degree, distance mode. What varies between two ₹65,000 programmes is whether anyone picks up the phone in month fourteen, when you are two submissions behind and privately deciding to quit. Teaching support is the only real variable left in this band, and it is the one nobody comparison-shops on, because it does not fit in a table.
In this price band the degree is not the risk. The risk is that you stop turning up in the second year, and nobody notices.
Here is the strongest version of the case against, and it deserves better than the strawman it usually gets: a ₹65,000 MBA reads as cheap. A hiring manager will treat it as cheap. You would be better off saving for a ₹2 lakh programme with a name attached — or doing nothing at all.
Half of that is right. The half that is right: a recruiter who screens on institutional brand will not be moved by a distance MBA at any price. That screen is real and no fee clears it.
The half that is wrong is the remedy. Paying three times more does not clear the same screen; it costs three times more to fail it. And the ₹65,000 is not visible to anyone. What appears on a verification desk is the awarding university, the mode, the specialisations and the year. Nobody downstream sees your receipt.
The trade this argument should be making is not ₹65,000 against ₹2 lakh. It is ₹65,000 against nothing — and there we agree with it more than people expect, because the real cost of an online MBA is not the fee. Two years of evenings costs the same in every band. An abandoned ₹65,000 programme is more expensive than a finished one at any price.
This section exists so that none of it reaches you for the first time at a verification desk.
Where it does the work is eligibility, which is the quiet majority of cases: promotion bands that require a postgraduate degree, public-sector and government recruitment that specifies a degree from a recognised university, further study that needs a master’s on the record, and employers abroad whose credential checks want a recognised awarding body. In all of those, the instrument is the point.
If you are weighing this against an autonomous institute’s own diploma instead, read what the IIM Act actually changed. Until 2018 the IIMs themselves awarded a PGDM — a diploma, not a degree — and nobody called it second-rate. The diploma is not automatically the lesser thing. But if the rulebook in front of you names a degree, take the degree and skip the equivalence argument entirely.
IICT has been doing this for a while: an autonomous institute that has worked out of Lucknow since 1997 and holds society registration under the Societies Registration Act, 1860. The diplomas it grants in its own name are not degrees in UGC terms — UGC purview does not reach them — and to its credit the institute says so plainly instead of blurring the line. There is also an academic MoU with Amity University on its books. An MoU is two institutions agreeing to cooperate — context, not a credential — and nothing about it ever lands in a student’s hands, so if someone presents it to you as though it did, you have just learned something about the person presenting it.
The checkable data point of the heading is deliberately a single sentence: Girish Kousgi — running IIFL Home Finance now, PNB Housing Finance before that — carries an IICT executive master’s diploma in Business Administration on the public record, printed in PNB Housing’s annual reports across three consecutive filings, FY22-23 through FY24-25; and one senior career, however real, is a data point rather than a distribution, so it proves nothing about typical outcomes.
The employer names on record: Tata, ICICI, HDFC, Reliance and the Indian Army — Indian corporates plus the public sector. Now apply our own rule to that list, because placement claims are almost entirely unverifiable. An employer base is a list of places people went. It is not a placement rate, not a median salary, not a cohort size and not a promise. If anyone quotes it to you as a placement statistic, that is your cue to ask for the median and watch what happens.
The programme is a dual specialisation MBA: two subjects from Finance, Operations Management, Strategic Management, Marketing and Human Resource Management. Everything else about your enrolment is fixed. This is not, so treat it as the decision it is.
The version that works is one specialisation matching the job you have and one matching the job you want. A warehouse or plant manager who wants to own a P&L takes Operations Management and Finance. An HR generalist aiming at a business-partner role takes Human Resource Management and Strategic Management. A sales manager who is tired of arguing about volume and wants to argue about margin takes Marketing and Finance. Two unrelated specialisations chosen because they sounded impressive on a page are two you will never use in a room.
Worth doing, with conditions. At ₹65,000 you are settling the awarding-body question and the entitlement question at close to the floor price for settling them at all — and for most people that is genuinely what is being bought. Do it if you are working and need the instrument: a promotion band, an eligibility rule, a credential check, a postgraduate line on the record. Do not do it if you are between jobs and expect the degree itself to produce one. Nothing in this band does that. Neither does anything three times the price; it just takes longer to find out.
And before any money moves, ask for the entitlement letter covering your programme, your mode and your intake year — the one document nobody tells you to ask for. If it comes back quickly, you have your answer. If it does not, you have a different answer, and it cost you nothing to get.
Below a certain price the differences are real. Above it, you are buying teaching and a cohort — not recognition. Almost nobody says which one they are selling you.
MoneyUnder ₹1 lakh, ₹1–2 lakh, above ₹2 lakh. The differences within a band are far smaller than the marketing suggests.
RecognitionThe entitlement letter for your programme, your mode and your intake year. Ask on the day you enrol, not on the day it matters.