Indian Institute Of Management Visakhapatnam

IIM Visakhapatnam taught its first management batch in August 2015 out of borrowed rooms on the Andhra University campus, and a decade on it runs its two-year Post Graduate Programme from a 241-acre coastal campus at Gambheeram. The programme admits through the CAT, its 2026-28 fee is Rs 11,79,295 a year, and the school sits at rank 29 in the Ministry of Education's NIRF 2025 management list. What is unusual about getting in is the weighting: an 82 percentile clears the first screen, but in the final reckoning the personal interview outscores the CAT almost two to one.

IIM Visakhapatnam is a public business school the central government set up in 2015, one of the younger Indian Institutes of Management rather than a founding one. Union Human Resource Development Minister Smriti Irani laid its foundation stone on 17 January 2015, and the institute enrolled its first Post Graduate Programme cohort that August, operating from the Andhra University campus in the city while its own campus was under construction, as its founding record sets out. IIM Bangalore mentored it through those early years, and the Indian Institutes of Management Act of 2017 later made it an Institution of National Importance with the authority to award its own degrees.

What marks it apart from an older IIM is its stage of life rather than the degree, which is the same statutory award the whole system grants. Its permanent home is a 241-acre campus at Gambheeram village on the northern edge of Visakhapatnam, a port city on the Andhra Pradesh coast, per its founding record. Its startup arm, IIMV FIELD, has run as the institute's incubation hub since 2018, a sector-agnostic centre that nonetheless leans on the region's own strengths in logistics, marine, health and wellness, and tourism, on its own record. For an applicant, that adds up to a genuine IIM tag and a national ranking attached to a school whose earliest alumni are only about ten years into their careers.

The programme the CAT admits to, and the one that carries the school's name, is the two-year, full-time, residential Post Graduate Programme in Management. It is an MBA-equivalent that the Association of Indian Universities recognises as equal to a master's degree, delivered across three terms a year with a summer internship between the two years, per the programme page. Around it sit programmes built for other audiences, including a Post-Graduate Programme in Management for graduates of the Centrally Funded Technical Institutions and Institutions of National Importance, an Executive MBA for working professionals, and doctoral and executive-doctoral tracks.

For the flagship PGP, each of the two years of the 2026-28 batch carries a grand total of Rs 11,79,295, billed across three terms, as the fee page sets out. Four of those terms carry the tuition charge of Rs 3,79,765, and the two that also collect the Rs 40,000 student welfare fee come to Rs 4,19,765 each.

On top of the tuition the institute takes a refundable caution deposit of Rs 40,000 in the first term and a per-term advance of Rs 25,000 against mess, air-conditioning and printing, from the same fee page. Aggregator sites quote a lower total that is out of date, so the binding figure is always the current fee page for your batch.

Admission to the PGP is built entirely on the CAT, with no institute-specific written test, and it runs in three phases, per the admission-process page. Phase 1 is the eligibility screen: a candidate needs a bachelor's degree in any discipline with at least 50 percent marks, relaxed to 45 percent for the SC, ST and PwD categories, along with a CAT score clearing the category thresholds. Phase 2 ranks the eligible pool on a pre-interview composite score to decide interview calls, and Phase 3 sets the final merit after the personal interview.

The weighting flips at the final stage. In Phase 3 the personal interview carries 48 points and the CAT drops to 25, with the academic record, gender diversity and work experience filling the rest, from the same page. A strong CAT percentile earns the interview call, but once you are in the room it is the interview that decides most of the outcome, which is an unusually heavy interview weight to plan for.

The CAT cutoff at IIM Visakhapatnam is a Phase 1 screening threshold, not the score that admits you. For the general category the institute asks for the 82nd percentile overall and the 70th percentile in each of the three CAT sections; the reserved-category thresholds fall from there, as the admission page lists.

Clearing the 82nd percentile puts a general-category applicant into the pool that is ranked for interview calls, not into a seat. Because the final merit re-weights the interview so heavily, the percentile that actually admits a candidate is settled only after the interview round, so read this table as the bar to be considered rather than the bar to get in.

IIM Visakhapatnam publishes an audited final placement report and a summer placement report for every PGP batch, back to the first 2015-17 cohort, on its placement reports page. Those audited documents are where the batch's average, median and highest salaries are recorded, along with the recruiter and sector mix.

We do not restate a package figure here that cannot be checked against the institute's own audited report, and neither the placement landing page nor a listing site's quoted number is that report. For the salary that should weigh on your decision, open the audited report for the most recently completed batch on that page and read the figure at its source.

IIM Visakhapatnam does not publish a category-wise seat matrix for the PGP in its public admission criteria, and the sanctioned intake for the 2026-28 batch is not stated on the pages an applicant can read, as the admission-process page shows. Reservation follows the central norms every IIM applies for the NC-OBC, SC, ST, EWS and benchmark-disability categories, but the exact number of seats behind each share is set internally and not listed. Confirm the current sanctioned intake with the admissions office before you plan around a specific seat count.

IIM Visakhapatnam is ranked 29th in the country on the NIRF 2025 management ranking with an overall score of 59.95. That is a real national standing for a school of its age, though it trails the founding IIMs that head the same list by a wide margin. The five parameters behind the total show why.

Read that total as five separate scores and the pattern of a 2015-founded school is unmistakable. Its highest marks fall where a competent management team has direct control inside a decade: graduation outcomes at 85.37 and teaching resources at 80.56. Its lowest fall where only time helps: perception at 39.15, which tracks how long a brand has been known, and research at 24.46, which tracks a publication record still being assembled. On the two parameters it can move by its own effort the institute is already strong; on the two that need age, it has had the fewest years of any ranked IIM to build one up.

Residential life runs across ten separate hostel buildings on campus, offered on single and double occupancy with Wi-Fi, discussion rooms, dining and indoor games, as the facilities page describes. Health cover is provided through an on-campus Health Centre staffed with a medical officer, counsellor and nurse, backed by a round-the-clock Medical Emergency Response and Intervention Team and student insurance for hospitalisation.

The library is the academic resource the institute leans on, running the open-source Koha system and subscribing to management databases including EBSCO Business Source Complete, Emerald Insight and Elsevier ScienceDirect, from the same page. Because the institute has operated across two sites, a city campus at Andhra University and the permanent Gambheeram campus, confirm which campus your programme runs on before you plan your move.

The faculty listing counts eleven academic areas, running from decision sciences, economics and public policy on the analytical side to finance, marketing, information systems and operations in the functional core, with entrepreneurship, strategy, management communication and organisational behaviour rounding out the list.

Each area owns both the core MBA course in its subject and the electives that branch off it, and a doctoral candidate sits with the area whose research they share. There is no single faculty headcount to cite, because the roster is published one profile at a time; an applicant who wants to gauge strength in, say, finance or public policy learns more from that one area's members than from an aggregate staff number carried on a listing site.

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