IIPM's 'MBA' ads were a 'maze to entrap students', Delhi HC ruled — the school wound up

The Indian Institute of Planning and Management, founded in 1973 by Malayendra Kisor Chaudhuri and fronted from the 1990s by his son Arindam, was less a business school than an advertising machine: nationwide campuses, full-page press ads and the tagline 'Dare to think beyond' the government-run IIMs. Students from small-town business families paid for management programmes wrapped in promises of global exposure and degrees from the International Management Institute (IMI), Belgium.

The catch was structural. UGC told the Delhi High Court that IIPM was not a university under Section 2(f) of the UGC Act and could not confer any degree; the court found IMI Belgium had been set up by Arindam Chaudhuri and his father and was not even recognised under Belgian law. UGC's November 2013 order had already found IIPM's advertisements potentially misleading; IIPM undertook not to publish ads without court approval — and then kept displaying 2014 admissions advertising anyway.

In September 2014 the Delhi High Court, Chief Justice G. Rohini and Justice Rajiv Sahai Endlaw, ruled this was 'clearly a maze created by the respondent IIPM to entrap students', enriched by 'huge expenditure... incurred by IIPM in publicity in print and electronic media'. It banned IIPM from using the words MBA, BBA, Management School or B-School, ordered prominent website notices of its non-recognition and of the judgment within a week, and imposed ₹25,000 in costs. Arindam Chaudhuri said he was 'surprised', claiming IIPM never advertised offering MBA or BBA at all.

The end came fast. On July 2, 2015 a notice on IIPM's website announced that 'all IIPM campuses now only have old students' and campuses were being shut down as batches finished — the admissions machine that had driven the brand for four decades was off. Chaudhuri's instinct had always been to litigate against critics: a defamation case against Careers360 (quashed by the Uttarakhand High Court) and a ₹50-crore suit against Caravan magazine, filed from Silchar in Assam.

₹25,000 in court costs, mandatory confession notices on its website, a ban on the words 'MBA/BBA' — and by July 2015, all campuses winding down.

Degrees were the product, and accreditation was the one input IIPM could not advertise its way around — UGC's affidavit said it was not entitled to confer any degree.

'Foreign recognition' was a loop: IMI Belgium was the founders' own creation, unrecognised in Belgium, presented to students as an external endorsement.

The ad spend itself became evidence — the court read lavish publicity budgets as proof of how much the deception earned.

Having undertook to stop advertising without court approval, IIPM kept running 2014 admissions ads, converting a compliance case into defiance.

When the product cannot deliver the outcome being advertised, marketing spend doesn't build a brand — it builds the evidence file a court will quote against you.

By August 2015, The Wire reported IIPM had shut its doors to new admissions, with campuses closing as old batches graduated and the institute reduced to corporate 'knowledge-sharing' training in Delhi. The Delhi High Court's findings — the 'maze', the fake foreign imprimatur, the banned vocabulary — remain the standing description of the brand. For thousands of alumni, the degrees they paid for remained unrecognized, which is the part no advertising budget could ever fix.