Great Lakes Institute Of Management, Gurgaon

Great Lakes Institute of Management, Gurgaon charges Rs 19,82,000 for its two-year PGDM, and a compulsory air-conditioned hostel place is already counted inside that figure rather than billed on top of it. Every one of the 180 students who finished that programme in 2024-25 was placed, at a median of Rs 11,83,000, on the return this campus filed with NIRF. None of that carries over from the older Great Lakes campus in Chennai: Gurgaon holds its AICTE approval in its own name, publishes its own fee sheet, and files its own NIRF data, where it sits at rank 50.

Great Lakes Institute of Management, Gurgaon is a privately financed standalone institute on Bilaspur Tauru Road in Gurugram district, Haryana. It has no affiliating university, so every programme it runs stands on approval held in its own name by the All India Council for Technical Education, under AICTE file number 1-2848010613, as its mandatory disclosure records. All of that teaching happens on a single 7.5-acre site, on the campus page.

Two dates are attached to the campus and they do not agree. Its own account says the institute was established in 2010, on the about page, while the extension of approval AICTE issued for 2026-27 records a year of establishment of 2016, in the regulator's letter. Neither document explains the other, so an applicant checking how old the campus is has the institute's account of itself on one side and the regulator's record of it on the other.

The teaching load is concentrated in two full-time residential programmes, a two-year PGDM and a one-year course the institute markets as the PGPM, with a doctoral fellowship and a large online portfolio behind them. The body running all of it is Great Lakes Institute of Management, a company incorporated under Section 25 of the Companies Act and registered in Chennai, as the disclosure sets out, which is why an AICTE letter for a Haryana institute carries a Chennai address for the society behind it.

The AICTE approval letter is the cleanest inventory of what this campus is licensed to teach, and it does not use the names on the website. For 2026-27 the regulator approves a Post Graduate Diploma in Management at an intake of 360, a Post Graduate Certificate in Management at 180, and a fellowship in business management at 10, in the extension of approval. That certificate line is the one-year programme sold as the PGPM: the institute's own mandatory disclosure files the PGCM's fee link and class profile under its PGPM pages, in the disclosure. So the two-year award is a diploma and the one-year award is approved at certificate level, whatever the brochure calls it. Neither is a university degree. The fellowship is the newest line of the three, logged in the disclosure as a doctoral course AICTE approved in 2022-23.

What a candidate actually budgets against is the two-year total, and the campus breaks that into heads rather than quoting a single line.

The one-year programme costs more in absolute rupees than the two-year one, and the gap is not living cost. Its 2026-27 sheet splits Rs 22,50,000 into Rs 12,44,000 of tuition and Rs 6,37,000 of programme fees, with Rs 3,69,000 more covering accommodation, the deposit and the alumni charge together; the same seat is quoted at USD 39,100 to an international candidate. Put the academic halves side by side and the point lands: Rs 18,81,000 for one year here against Rs 13,35,000 for two on the PGDM sheet.

Both totals cover reading material, case studies and textbooks, and vegetarian meals; a laptop, travel and personal spending are outside them, and refunds follow AICTE norms rather than an institute policy of its own.

Selection here runs without a written test of its own and without a group discussion round. A candidate files one online application with a fee of INR 2,200, passes an application screening, sits an AI-proctored video interview, and then attends a personal interview before an offer is issued, as the PGDM admissions page sets out.

Which programme you are eligible for is settled by how long you have worked, not by what you studied. Only freshers and candidates carrying strictly less than 36 months of work experience as on 30 May 2026 may apply to the PGDM at all, on the same page. The one-year programme inverts that test, wanting 2+ years behind an applicant, and it is the only one of the two that will read an NMAT score, on its own admissions page. Anyone sitting in the two-to-three year band qualifies for both, may file separate applications, and can be steered by the admissions panel towards whichever fits the profile better.

Test scores expire here, and the windows are narrow enough to catch people out. For the PGDM 2026 intake the campus reads a GMAT taken after 1 January 2024 in any edition, Classic, Focus or Online, a CAT from 2025 or 2026, and an XAT from 2026 or 2027, per the same admissions page. Great Lakes attaches an unusually blunt footnote to two of those: it uses CAT purely to screen applications and the IIMs have no role in running its programmes, and it is not an associate institute of XLRI either. The academic floor underneath all of it is a bachelor's degree in any discipline with at least 50% in class 10, class 12 and the degree.

Two smaller rules are worth knowing before you apply. College and university rank holders earn extra weightage in the selection process, and women applicants are awarded additional points as a diversity measure. Great Lakes also states that applications run only through its own online form and that it has authorised no third party to file one on its behalf, so an agent offering to arrange a place is not selling access it holds.

There is no published Great Lakes Gurgaon cut-off, and the campus says as much in the one document a regulator makes it answer. In its AICTE mandatory disclosure, the row headed "Cut off / last candidate admitted" reads NA and the row for admission quota reads NA as well; the admission criteria recorded there are GMAT, CAT, XAT, NMAT and a personal interview, in the disclosure itself.

That leaves the percentile figures circulating on coaching forums with nothing official behind them. What decides an outcome is the combination the disclosure names: a valid score in one of four tests, a consistent record across three academic levels, and two interview rounds that carry unusual weight precisely because no written paper or group discussion sits beside them.

For the two-year programme the binding filter is not a percentile at all. An applicant who crosses 36 months of full-time work before the eligibility date stops qualifying for the PGDM however high the test score, and the one-year programme becomes the only way in.

The two-year PGDM has two separate published records of the same class, and they agree, which is rarer than it sounds. On the campus's own PGDM 2025 placement report, the Class of 2025 averaged 11.8 lakhs a year and the largest single offer, 22.7 lakhs, came from a mining company. The NIRF 2026 return covers that identical cohort, the students who graduated in 2024-25, and puts the median at Rs 11,83,000 with all 180 of them placed, in the submitted data.

That the two figures sit level is the useful part. Where a handful of very large offers pull a mean upward, an advertised average describes almost nobody in the room; at Gurgaon the average and the median are within a few thousand rupees of each other, so the headline number is close to what a student in the middle of the class actually collected.

HCL Technologies made the largest number of offers that season, ahead of KPMG, Deloitte USI, City Union Bank and Bank of America, and PwC, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, HDFC Bank and WNS Vuram were among 20+ recruiters new to the campus. By industry, IT and ITES took 26% of the offers, consulting 25% and BFSI 23%, on the same placement report.

The longer series is the one filed with NIRF, and it moves in one direction.

Read the last row against the first before treating the campus as a settled quantity. The class more than tripled in size over those four cohorts, and the number placed rose faster than the number graduating rather than falling behind it, and the NIRF 2025 rank was computed on the earlier and smaller of those cohorts, not the latest one.

The one-year programme places into a different market. Its PGPM 2026 placement report records an average CTC of 16.2 lakhs and a highest of 34.5 lakhs, with Deloitte, Infosys and Accenture making the most offers and 15+ recruiters arriving for the first time. The programme page adds that the top tenth of that class averaged 25 LPA, that 52% took consulting roles, and that 42% moved out of an IT job into a non-IT function.

Seats on the two-year programme have tripled since 2022-23, and the filings date every step of it. The sanctioned intake was 120 in 2022-23 and 180 in 2023-24, in the data submitted for NIRF 2025, and 300 in 2024-25, in the 2026 submission. AICTE has now approved 360 for both 2025-26 and 2026-27, in the extension of approval.

The two online lines are the ones to read carefully. AICTE puts them under a heading of their own, Approved Online Courses, and records both as having started in 2022, so they are not extra room on the residential campus and a candidate comparing seat counts across business schools should hold them well apart from the 360 and 180 on site.

There is no category-wise split beneath any of those numbers and there will not be one, because Great Lakes states that it admits nobody under a management quota or any other form of reservation, on its admissions page. The intake is a single pool. It is also close to full: the campus admitted 180 students against a sanctioned 180 in 2023-24 and carried a total strength of 458 across both years of the programme, in its NIRF 2026 filing.

Rank 50 in the NIRF 2025 management ranking is the only externally audited position this campus holds, and the 54.08 total behind it is assembled from five parameter scores that run from 79.77 all the way down to 3.82.

Outreach and inclusivity at 79.77 is the top of that range and graduation outcomes at 75.29 sits just under it, on the 2025 table. The class behind the first of those is genuinely mixed: the campus reported 200 women among 458 students, in the data it filed for NIRF 2026. The second tracks the placement series above.

Research and professional practice at 26.23 is the weaker half of the picture, and the same filing shows one reason: the campus recorded no full-time and no part-time doctoral students on its rolls, even though AICTE approves ten fellowship places. Perception at 3.82 is the score that holds the total down hardest. NIRF builds it from surveys of employers and academics, and a campus this young has almost none of that recognition banked yet.

One limit travels with that rank. Every row in the NIRF filing sits under the heading for two-year postgraduate programmes, so the rank, the score and the median salary behind them describe the PGDM. The one-year programme is not inside the return, and it is therefore not inside the rank either.

What the mandatory disclosure lists is narrower and more specific than what a brochure describes, and it is the better document to plan around.

Around that sit the things a residential student actually lives with. The campus page puts air-conditioned hostels for boys and girls on the site, rooms fitted with study desks, storage, housekeeping and 24/7 high-speed Wi-Fi, medical staff on call round the clock, and a night canteen that stays open till 2:45 AM, which is the detail that tells you most about how a term here runs. For exercise the campus lists a well-equipped gym and outdoor facilities for cricket, football, basketball, badminton and volleyball, and names table tennis, carrom and foosball as the indoor options, with a unisex salon among the everyday services. The one teaching space missing from the AICTE list is a Spatial Reality lab with AR and VR devices, which sits beside the language lab and computer centre that the list does carry.

The hostel is a condition of admission rather than a choice. Both fee pages say the programme is residential in nature and hostel facility is therefore mandatory, so the Rs 6,32,000 twin-sharing AC charge and the vegetarian meals that come with it are bought by every PGDM admit, and neither is a line a candidate can strike out to bring the Rs 19,82,000 down, on the fee sheet. That sheet carries one caveat worth reading twice: housing and catering may be outsourced at the institute's discretion, with the charges paid to the service providers on the student's behalf.

The only public faculty count with names against it is the roster the campus files with NIRF. The 2026 submission lists 33 people, of whom 31 are recorded as currently working at the institute, and all but four hold a doctorate. Five of them joined in 2016 and are still in post.

The grade mix leans senior: professors and associate professors together outnumber assistant professors on that list. Prof. Jones Mathew is the principal, with marketing as his field of specialisation, per the mandatory disclosure, while Dr. Raj Krishnan Shankar is named as director, on the about page.

The roster is also being built out rather than held flat. The campus entered 22 faculty members for NIRF 2025, in that year's submitted data, and 33 in the following filing, over the same stretch in which its sanctioned intake moved from 180 to 300, in the 2026 submission. Most of that growth is recent hiring rather than accumulated tenure, which is worth knowing before reading a brochure count of teaching strength: the NIRF list is the only version that carries a joining date, a designation and a qualification against every name, so it is the one an applicant can actually check.

The corporate-hub framing on the website deserves a map check before anyone plans around it. The campus stands 45 km from Indira Gandhi International Airport and 30 km from Gurgaon city, 14 km past IMT Manesar Chowk on National Highway 48 towards Jaipur, on the contact page. It is a self-contained residential site off a highway rather than an office-district campus, and Great Lakes keeps a separate city office on Golf Course Road for anything that needs a Gurugram address.

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