The Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) are introducing stand-alone UG programmes with a diminishing flow of government money as a response to NEP 2020 and under fire for revenue-based motivations.

In parallel, IIM Udaipur will launch an on-campus BBA course from next year. The fees for UG courses vary from ₹4.5 lakh for IIM Bangalore's online BBA to almost ₹28 lakh for Kozhikode's Bachelor in Management Studies (BMS).

The expansion of the UG courses is attributed by IIM officials to the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 push for flexible learning and driven by academic requirements and not by finances. Despite this, government investment has fallen significantly—dropping by up to 75.5% from ₹1,030 crore in 2017-18 to ₹251.89 crore in 2025-26—after the IIM Act, 2017 gave autonomy to the institutions. All IIMs offering undergrad courses except IIM Kozhikode have taken Higher Education Financing Agency (HEFA) loans of ₹250– ₹400 crore, where the institutes repay the amount while the government reimburses the interest.

Students view the high fees as an investment that provides exposure to the IIM environment — best faculty, peer pool, and brand equity. Experts warn, however, that the shift can water down the IIMs' focused attention, turning them into mass universities as they would come under pressure to raise their own revenues.

IIM UG programmes

IIM Sirmaur launched the BMS course, the first UG course of an IIM, in September 2024.

Justifying the shift, IIM Sirmaur director Dr. Prafulla Agnihotri added, "Most UG management courses in contemporary universities are too theoretical in nature. We believed that management education should sharpen decision-making and offer greater practical application of theory to its students and launched the BMS course last year.".

He acknowledged the transition was hard on staff initially, who had no past experience teaching undergrads, but added, "After a year, our faculty have settled into the challenges of the BMS."

IIM Sirmaur's BMS course received 2,373 applications for only 120 seats this year, for which the four-year program would cost ₹22.73 lakh. Admission is given based on marks secured by students in the written test Integrated Program in Management Aptitude Test (IPMAT) organized by IIM Indore and personal interview.

Indian Institutes of Management (Amendment) Bill, 2025 was unanimously approved by the Lok Sabha with a view to setting up a new Indian Institute of Management (IIM) at Guwahati, Assam. The move is a leap in a giant stride towards providing the world-class management education to India's North-East region, an age-old regional aspiration.

What the Bill Proposes

The Bill also amends the Indian Institutes of Management Act, 2017, to specifically include IIM Guwahati in the list of national management institutes. The institution will be given a central grant of ₹550 crore to fund its establishment, infrastructure, and operational facility.

Implication of IIM Guhawati

Having an IIM located there will ensure level playing fields for access to quality management education.

The institute would serve as a growth catalyst for the area, drawing in capital and talent.

The project not only bears pedagogical importance but also adds to the realization of the national growth dream by taking everyone along, which will open doors to include the Northeast within the higher echelons of education in India.

IIMs: A Brand on the Rise

There are 21 functional IIMs in the country today. They were a global brand of managerial education quality from the very beginning, and more and more foreigners are eager to join them.

The interesting thing is that even the government is setting up an IIM campus in Dubai this month, indicating India emerging as a global power in higher education and internationalizing Indian higher education institutions.

Parliamentary Context

Notwithstanding the enactment of the Bill, it was passed without debate in Lok Sabha in the face of SIR issue opposition unrest. Notwithstanding unrest, the law was enacted, an indication of bipartisan good will towards educational advancement in the face of political unrest.

Strategic and Educational Impact

The IIM Guwahati will likely to,

Enhance infrastructure for management education in Northeast India.

Promote entry of boys and girls from backward and tribal areas in professional education.

Promote employment, research, and innovation at the levels of Assam and other states.

Promote entrepreneurship and indigenous enterprise via management capacity.

Taking a major step towards creating the future of management and technology education, Masai, India's largest outcome-based EdTech company, partnered with the Indian Institute of Management Tiruchirappalli (IIM Trichy) to launch two game-changing certificate courses — Digital Marketing with Applied AI and Product Management for the Agentic AI Era.

Six-month programs, up for enrollment, aim to help professionals stay abreast of an increasingly evolving business scenario. While the international digital marketing industry is anticipated to grow to USD 786 billion in 2026 and AI-powered product strategies enable organizations to reduce time-to-market by up to 35 percent, the programs aim to put the ability to thrive under the age of intelligent automation in learners' hands.

The Digital Marketing course with AI explores campaign planning, prompt engineering, AI tools, and measurement, featuring over 20 hands-on projects to build a solid portfolio. The Product Management program explores how Agentic AI is changing product lifecycles, with emphasis on strategy, design, and execution. The programs feature real-world case studies, faculty mentoring at IIM Trichy along with industry mentors, as well as career counseling.

Stressing the alliance, Masai Co-founder & CEO Prateek Shukla indicated that the alliance brings together academic rigour with industry relevance to train the students for roles of leadership. Seconding the opinion, Prof. Saravanan P, Dean (Corporate Relations & Faculty Affairs), IIM Trichy, emphasized again that the focus is on applied learning so that industry-ready students are sent out for graduation.

Masai further announced that it is developing an AI-powered Fintech program, further enriching its pipeline of future-ready offerings. The newly launched programs are now open for applying on the Masai School platform.

 A recent conference was organized by Association of Indian Management Schools (AIMS) on the implication and application of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 in management education. 

Among the dominant themes was preparing students with sets of competencies that would place them to thrive in a digitalization era. Conference presenters highlighted accepting technological developments through curriculum creation, experimentation, and career counseling of learners. Technology integration and collaborations with business partners were discovered to be crucial to today and relevant management education.Academic leaders, industry professionals, and policy administrators attended the conference and shared their views on how NEP 2020 can transform management studies in India.

It talked about how NEP 2020 encourages the students' choice with the opening up of management education to inter-disciplinary programmes such as hospitality management, business economics, and data science. It encouraged specialists in favour of a student-centric model, which entails the development of employment skills through internships and practice training and making the graduates employable for 21st-century workplace needs.

Panellists discussed issues for schools, such as infrastructure and building modernisation, investment in teacher training, and greater flexibility among students. The ultimate objective is to make the innovation, inclusiveness, and domestic as well as global reputation of management education in India more robust.

The conference concluded on a positive note with recommendations for continuous improvement, industry-academia interface, and commitment towards making the students career-proof and lifelong learners