Confirm the identity
Match the institute name, permanent ID, campus and city.
DIRECTORY NOTE 01Independent informational portal
Before the first instalment
Seven checks, run in this order, each one making the next cheaper. The last of them is the payment itself.
Use this directory to narrow the search. Use the regulator record to make the final decision.
VERIFICATION ROUTE / 2026A brochure is a claim. The current official record is the proof.Current file: Before the first instalment
Match the programme
Check the exact MBA, PGDM or management course and approved intake.
Match the academic year
An old letter is not proof for the current admission session.
What to have in hand
Before step one, gather the offer letter or admission email, the prospectus or programme page, the fee quotation, and — importantly — anything a counsellor promised only verbally, which you now request by email. “Please confirm in writing what we discussed” is a verification step in its own right: claims that evaporate when written down have told you what they were.
The order is doing the work
Run out of sequence, verification is expensive: you can spend an evening in approval databases before discovering the award actually comes from a different body than the one you searched. Run in sequence, each answer narrows the next question, and the whole thing fits in an afternoon plus a couple of email replies. The list ends at the payment because the payment is a check too.
The sequence is deliberately mode-agnostic. It works unchanged on a university distance degree, a campus MBA, a standalone PGDM and an autonomous institute's diploma — only the registers consulted at steps two and three differ, and step one tells you which ones they are. That is why nothing here asks you to first decide what kind of offer you are holding; the checklist makes that determination for you.
Seven steps, in sequence
- Get the awarding body named in writing. One question: whose name and seal appear on the final award, exactly? Everything branches from the answer — a university points to one set of registers, an autonomous institute to another. A refusal to answer plainly ends the process early, which is the checklist working as designed.
- Find that body on its own register. A university should appear on the UGC's list of recognised universities under its exact legal name. An institute should have a verifiable legal registration and a traceable history. A PGDM offer should map to a current AICTE approval row — every field of which is explained here.
- Check the programme, mode and session. The course you were offered, in the mode you will study, for the session you will join, on the register that governs that mode. For distance and online degrees that means the DEB entry, and the session-dating subtlety has a guide of its own.
- Match the paperwork to the register. Offer letter, prospectus and receipts should carry the same legal name, campus and programme spelling as the register entry. Near-matches — a sister trust, an extra word in the name, a different campus — are where most bad offers live.
- Get the complete money picture in one document. Total cost to completion, the instalment schedule, what each instalment covers, examination and certification charges, and the refund rule — dated, on letterhead. A figure that exists only on a phone call does not exist.
- Ask for the specimen award and read it line by line against everything step one promised.
- Pay traceably, to the institution. Bank transfer or the institution's own payment gateway, into an account in the institution's name — never a personal UPI handle, never cash — with a receipt naming the institution, the programme and the instalment. The payment rail is the final verification: a legitimate institution has no reason to route fees anywhere else.
When a step fails
A failed check is not an invitation to negotiate; it is the answer arriving early, at the cheapest possible moment. The one pattern that should end a conversation by itself is pressure to pay before a check can finish — a deadline that cannot survive a few days of verification was designed not to. If a step merely stalls — slow replies, partial documents — treat time as information and keep the money still.
And when every step passes, you are left holding something valuable beyond reassurance: a dated file — register entries saved with their dates, the written fee schedule, the specimen, the receipt — that answers most questions any future verifier could ask about your enrolment. Keep it for the life of the qualification.
The page-length version of this method, applied to any MBA offer in the same order, sits at mba.aicte.mba; the field-by-field companion for step two is the verification walkthrough.