Indian Institute Of Management Sirmaur

IIM Sirmaur prices its 2026-28 MBA at exactly Rs 21,00,000, a round figure it builds term by term in its own programme brief. The institute is placed 51st on the Ministry of Education's NIRF 2025 management table on a score of 54.03, and the data it filed for NIRF 2026 records a median salary of Rs 14,20,000 for the class that finished in 2024-25, with 293 of its 295 graduating students placed. It also runs the tourism MBA that no other IIM had opened before it, and that programme screens applicants several percentile points below the general one.

The site came before the school. On 15 August 2014 the Chief Minister of Himachal Pradesh announced that the state's IIM would be built at Dhaula Kuan near Nahan, in Sirmaur district, on the reasoning that a management school there would lift the socio-economic position of the surrounding population, the institute's campus record states. Teaching began on 4 September 2015 with a batch of 20 students in a transit campus at Paonta Sahib, run under the mentorship of IIM Lucknow, its own history page notes. The postal address the institute now gives is Dhaula Kuan, and it keeps a second city campus at Paonta Sahib.

What separates IIM Sirmaur from the other schools of its generation is the sector it chose. It was the first institute in the IIM system to open a sectoral MBA in tourism and hospitality management, by its own account, and tourism has since become an organising idea rather than a single degree. Two of the three MBA degrees it fills through CAT carry a tourism title, and the bodies it belongs to include the Pacific Asia Travel Association and the Indian Association of Tour Operators alongside the usual management associations.

Scale followed. The NIRF 2026 filing puts 601 students on the two-year postgraduate roll, of whom 592 come from outside Himachal Pradesh and nine from within it. A school built to change a district's economy therefore teaches an almost entirely out-of-state cohort, which is worth knowing before you read the campus as a local institution.

Eleven separate admission tracks were open on the institute's admission management system for 2026, spread across doctoral, masters, executive and bachelors levels. Where the application form points is the quickest way to tell them apart, because the CAT-fed MBAs are applied for on a portal the institute does not host itself.

One row in that table needs a caveat. The portal still lists a separate application link for the Supernumerary Admission Process, but the MBA admission policy says the SAP round has been integrated with CAP this cycle and that a female applicant must apply through the CAP portal only. Where the two disagree, the policy is the document that governs.

The MBA is billed across six terms, and the total lands on a round number because the last two terms are charged slightly less than the first four.

The MBA in Tourism Management is charged on the identical schedule, so the sectoral degree carries no price premium over the general one. Alumni membership and mediclaim are billed only in Terms I and IV, at Rs 3,000 and Rs 2,000 each time, on the fee table, which is why those two terms cost more than the ones beside them.

The undergraduate degree is the surprise on the price list. The four-year BMS charges Rs 2,50,000 in tuition every semester and totals Rs 22,73,000, on its own brief, which is more than the two-year MBA costs. The executive route is priced the other way: PGPEX-LSM, a one-year residential programme with its second term taught at RWTH Aachen University in Germany and coursework at a Siemens manufacturing lab in India, is billed at Rs 11,00,000, with the German term's fees paid directly to RWTH Aachen and not included, per that programme's brief.

Selection for the MBA runs in two phases, and IIM Sirmaur conducts neither the test nor the interview on its own. Phase one screens CAT 2025 scores against published category thresholds; phase two builds a merit list from a composite score, the 2026-28 admission policy sets out. The interview in between belongs to the Common Admission Process, which for the 2026-28 intake has three members, IIM Jammu as coordinator alongside IIM Bodh Gaya and IIM Sirmaur, and which puts a candidate through a single interview whose score each of the three then carries into its own separate merit list, per the joint notice dated 20 January 2026. No written ability test sits in that round. The policy provides for a personal interview conducted offline and nothing beyond it.

Read that column carefully, because the policy gives the CAT 35 marks out of a composite score of 100 and leaves 65 to everything else. Academic performance is the only component that reads a candidate's whole school and college record, and it is capped at 15, awarded 3 for Class X, 4 for Class XII and up to 8 for graduation, under the same table. Work experience is worth more than either.

Notice where that band stops and where it does not. The peak sits between roughly two and three years of service, and the tail never reaches zero: a candidate past 53 completed months still keeps 5 marks, in the same table. Long service is discounted here rather than erased, which matters to an applicant who has spent most of a decade in a job before deciding on an MBA.

The Trailblazer line is the unusual one, and it is worth as much as gender diversity. Five marks go to candidates holding an engineering degree, a medical or dental or veterinary or ayurveda or homoeopathy qualification, a design, architecture, planning or pharmacy degree, or a chartered accountancy, cost accountancy or company secretary qualification, under the same policy. An arts, commerce or general science graduate cannot score on that row at all, so a batch already tilted towards professional degrees gets a small extra push in the same direction.

Reservation follows the Government of India schedule, with 27% of seats for NC-OBC candidates, 15% for Scheduled Caste, 7.5% for Scheduled Tribe, up to 10% for Economically Weaker Sections and 5% for candidates with benchmark disabilities, the policy confirms. Separately, it sets aside 40 seats for female students, and states that the Supernumerary Admission Process has been folded into CAP this cycle, so a woman applying through that route now applies on the CAP portal rather than a separate one.

There is not one CAT bar here but two, and the gap between them is the most practical thing on this page for a borderline candidate. The general two-year MBA screens a general-category man at a 90 overall percentile with 65 in each section, and a general-category woman at 85 overall, in the cut-off the institute has announced. Those are the same figures the three CAP schools publish jointly, and the joint notice is careful to add that the percentile which actually earns an interview call may land above them, since it turns on how many candidates each school chooses to shortlist, in the notice of 20 January 2026. That notice covers the general MBA only, and it says so.

The two tourism MBAs open lower on both counts. A general-category man is screened at 85 overall with 60 in each section, and a general-category woman at 80 overall, in the tourism admission policy. The reserved-category gap is wider still: an NC-OBC candidate is asked for 75 overall on the general MBA and 60 on the tourism ones. A candidate whose CAT lands in the low eighties has a genuine route into an IIM here, provided the sector is one they actually want to work in.

The undergraduate bar is published on a different scale entirely. Shortlisting for the BMS uses an aptitude test score built from IPMAT, weighting the verbal ability section at half and the two quantitative sections at a quarter each, and the phase one cut-off came out at 55 for the general category, 28 for EWS, 26 for NC-OBC, 17 for SC and 1 for ST and PwD candidates. Every figure in this section is a shortlisting threshold; the offers themselves are made strictly in order of composite merit afterwards.

The steadiest read on outcomes is not the placement brochure but the data the institute files with the Ministry of Education, because it uses the same definition every year: students who graduated in the minimum stipulated time, how many were placed, and the median salary of those placed.

That median has risen in every one of the four years, and the placed count has never fallen more than a handful short of the graduating count. Averages are the other number people quote, and IIM Sirmaur publishes those separately: its own cross-school comparison table records an average CTC of Rs 14.45 lakh for 2023 against Rs 12.81 lakh the year before, in its placement report for 2023-24, while the report for 2024-25 puts the batch average at Rs 13.3 lakh, Rs 13.7 lakh for male students and Rs 12.4 lakh for female students. The two series are not measured on the same basis, so read the median row as the one that compares like with like across years.

Two things about the most recent season are worth a candidate's attention. More than 250 unique recruiters came to campus, and 28 students, close to a tenth of the batch, secured off-campus offers that the institute says it verified itself, per that report. The cohort was also unusually junior: only 64 of the 295 students carried any prior work experience, averaging 17.1 months, which the placement office says pushed it towards recruiters willing to hire for potential.

What the report does not print is a highest package or a placement percentage. Its foreword argues that a headline average tells a reader very little when a batch mixes freshers with experienced hires, and it commits the institute to releasing a verified report only after students have cleared probation. Anyone quoting a top salary for IIM Sirmaur is quoting a number the school has not published.

Intake here has moved, and it moved downwards last. The sanctioned strength for the two-year postgraduate programmes was cut to 285 for 2024-25 from 320 in each of the two years before it, the NIRF 2026 filing records.

Admissions have landed under the approved ceiling in every year the institute reports both columns, though the shortfall has narrowed sharply since the earliest of them. On the roll as filed, 429 of the 601 postgraduate students are men and 172 are women, 318 belong to the Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe or OBC categories and 93 are recorded as economically backward.

No category-by-category seat grid for a single intake is published anywhere on the institute's admission pages. What can be pinned down is the rule the grid would be built from: the Government of India reservation percentages in the admission policy, plus the 40 supernumerary seats that policy reserves for female students. Treat the sanctioned intake as the ceiling and the reservation schedule as the shape, and check the current year's policy for anything more exact.

NIRF placed the institute 51st among management schools in 2025, on a total of 54.03 out of 100, in the Ministry of Education's published table. Its own rankings page still carries the note it wrote against the NIRF 2022 result, when a rank of 69 in management was called a big achievement for a new institute, as that page shows. The direction of travel across the three cycles between those two entries has been upward.

The five parameters split cleanly into what the school controls and what it has not had time to build. Graduation outcomes at 83.86, outreach at 73.72 and teaching resources at 74.08 are all respectable, and they measure things a well-run institute can fix inside a single admission cycle. Research at 20.25 and perception at 15.98 are the drag, and perception is the lowest of the five by a clear margin: it is a survey of academics and employers, and a school teaching from a hillside district since 2015 has had fewer chances to enter that conversation than one in a metro. An applicant weighing the brand should read those two numbers as the honest price of the lower cut-off.

Getting there is part of what you are choosing. The Dhaula Kuan campus sits on the Ambala to Dehradun national highway, 15 km from Paonta Sahib, 103 km from Chandigarh airport and 97 km from Dehradun airport, with the nearest railheads at Yamuna Nagar 60 km away and Dehradun 68 km away, the institute's campus record notes. Himalayan ranges stand to the north of the site and the Shivaliks to the south.

The build itself is large for a school of this size. The Government of India approved Rs 392.51 crore for the first phase, covering 60,384 square metres of construction for 600 students on 210 acres of land, and the phase-one drawings include 14 hostel blocks of ground plus three floors, a separate building for 16 married students, a student activity centre with squash, billiards and a gymnasium, an auditorium, an MDP centre, an incubation centre and a health centre, all in the same record.

Those plans are being paid for now, not someday. In 2024-25 the institute spent Rs 42,86,09,335 on creating capital assets, against Rs 12,42,06,936 the year before, alongside Rs 14,23,50,712 on setting up and upgrading laboratories and Rs 2,06,27,766 on library books, journals and e-resources, its NIRF 2026 filing shows. That same filing records lifts or ramps in more than 80% of buildings, and specially designed toilets in the same share of them.

The faculty roster in the NIRF 2026 filing runs to 56 names, listed individually with designation, qualification, experience in months and joining date. Six are professors and 12 are associate professors; 36 of the teaching posts are held by assistant professors, four appointments are adhoc or contractual, and three entries carry a leaving date during 2025. Every regular appointment on the list holds a doctorate. A bench weighted that heavily towards assistant professors is what a decade-old institute in a hiring phase looks like, and it means the senior name in a given subject may be one person rather than a group.

Teaching is organised into research areas rather than departments, and the PhD brief names ten of them: decision sciences, economics and business environment, finance and accounting, management information systems, marketing management, operations and supply chain management, organisational behaviour and human resources, public policy and sociology, strategic management, and tourism management. That last area is the one the institute is building a sectoral identity on, and it is where its externally funded work is likeliest to sit.

The research base is still shallow, which is what the NIRF research score reflects. The institute reported 17 full-time and seven part-time doctoral students, no doctoral completions at all in 2022-23, 2023-24 or 2024-25, and sponsored research of Rs 64,55,160 across ten projects in 2024-25, up from Rs 59,02,650 the year before, in the same filing. Executive education has grown faster: 15 development programmes drew 532 participants in 2024-25, against seven programmes the year before.

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