Sarkari Jaancho
Do not take our word. Check it yourself.
Every government portal that lets you verify an Indian college, what each one actually proves, and a link that goes straight there. We opened all of them on 4 September 2026.
Why we are handing you the tools instead of the answers. A brand that asks for your trust and then hides its working has not earned anything. Everything we publish comes from these portals, so you should be able to reach them without us. If our report and the portal ever disagree, the portal is right and we are wrong, and we want to hear about it.
The order matters. Work down this page in order. Most families check the college and stop, and the trap is usually two steps further down: the institution is genuine but the course is not approved, or the grade expired three years ago.
1. Is the institution real?
Start here. Everything else is pointless if this fails.
University Grants Commission
The list of recognised universities
If it calls itself a university, it must appear here. The entry carries the type (state, private, central or deemed) and the date it was recognised.
A college affiliated to a university will not appear under its own name. That is normal, not a red flag.
Open the UGC list (PDF) ↗ Or search it here, sorted and filterableUniversity Grants Commission
The fake university list
Institutions the UGC has declared are not universities at all. A degree from any of them is worth nothing, academically or in a job.
Fake institutions copy real names on purpose. Match the full name and the address, not just the first two words.
Open the fake list ↗ Or check a name here in one fieldMinistry of Education
AISHE, the national institution directory
The All India Survey on Higher Education. Colleges that are not universities appear here, with their AISHE code and the university they are affiliated to.
Open AISHE ↗AICTE
Approved institutions and their seats
For engineering, management, pharmacy, applied arts and computer applications. This dashboard shows approved institutions and the intake sanctioned for each course.
This is where you check seats. If a college promises you a seat in a course whose sanctioned intake is already full, ask how.
Open the AICTE dashboard ↗2. Is your course approved?
This is the step families skip, and it is the one that ends careers. A university can be perfectly genuine while a particular course in it has no council approval, and you will only find out when a licence or a job application is refused. Find your field below.
| If you are studying | The body that must approve it | Check here |
|---|---|---|
| MBBS, MD, MS | National Medical Commission | NMC college and course search |
| BDS, MDS | Dental Council of India | dciindia.gov.in |
| B.Pharm, D.Pharm, Pharm.D | Pharmacy Council of India | pci.nic.in |
| B.Sc Nursing, GNM, ANM | Indian Nursing Council | indiannursingcouncil.org |
| LLB, BA LLB, LLM | Bar Council of India | BCI list of approved law colleges |
| B.Arch, M.Arch | Council of Architecture | coa.gov.in |
| B.Ed, D.El.Ed, M.Ed | National Council for Teacher Education | ncte.gov.in |
| B.Tech, BE, MBA, MCA | AICTE | AICTE approved institutions |
| BAMS, BUMS, BSMS | National Commission for Indian System of Medicine | ncismindia.org |
| BHMS | National Commission for Homoeopathy | nch.org.in |
| B.Sc Agriculture and allied | Indian Council of Agricultural Research | icar.org.in |
| Special education, rehabilitation | Rehabilitation Council of India | rehabcouncil.nic.in |
| Any distance or online degree | UGC Distance Education Bureau | deb.ugc.ac.in |
Distance and online deserves its own warning. A university may be perfectly genuine on campus and still have no approval to run your programme by distance or online. UGC DEB lists which universities may offer which programmes in which mode, and it is checked far too rarely. If you are enrolling in anything that is not full-time on campus, this is the single most important link on this page for you.
And some programmes cannot be done this way at all. Under the UGC (ODL and Online Programmes) Regulations 2020, these disciplines and their allied domains are prohibited in distance or online mode, whatever an institution advertises:
Engineering · Medical · Physiotherapy · Occupational Therapy · Other para-medical disciplines · Pharmacy · Nursing · Dental · Architecture · Law · Agriculture · Horticulture · Hotel Management · Catering Technology · Culinary Sciences · Aircraft Maintenance · Visual Art · Sports
Research degrees are prohibited too: M.Phil and Ph.D cannot be awarded through distance or online mode.
If anybody offers you a B.Tech, a B.Pharm, a nursing degree or an LL.B by distance or online, the answer is not "check whether they are approved". The answer is that no institution in India can approve it. Walk away, and tell us, because that is the sort of thing families should be warned about by name.
3. What does the record say about quality?
Recognition is the floor. These two say something about the standard, and both have limits worth knowing.
NAAC
Accreditation, and the reform most people have missed
For years NAAC graded institutions from A++ downward with a CGPA out of 4, and those grades are what you still see on brochures. That system is being replaced.
Following the Dr Radhakrishnan Committee, NAAC stopped accepting fresh applications under the old Revised Accreditation Framework on 30 June 2024 and moved to Binary Accreditation, which records simply whether an institution is Accredited or Not Accredited. A graded system called Maturity Based Graded Levels is to follow. Institutions already graded keep that grade until it expires.
Two consequences a family should hold on to. A grade still needs its CGPA, its cycle and its expiry date, because an institution quoting a grade without a date is quoting history. And a college with no grade is no longer necessarily unaccredited, because new accreditation does not issue one. Ask which framework, and ask for the certificate.
Open NAAC ↗Ministry of Education
NIRF ranking
The National Institutional Ranking Framework, published every year across categories.
NIRF ranks only institutions that submitted data. A good college that did not take part is simply absent, and that is not a mark against it.
Open NIRF ↗ Or read the 2025 tables here, by courseNBA
Programme accreditation
The National Board of Accreditation accredits individual programmes, not the whole institution. A college may hold NBA for one branch and not another.
Ask which branch is accredited and until when. "NBA accredited college" on a brochure is not an answer.
Open NBA ↗Association of Indian Universities
Degree equivalence
AIU decides whether a degree is treated as equivalent, which matters for higher study, government jobs, and any foreign qualification.
Open AIU ↗4. The money
Two portals decide how much your family actually pays, and both are free to use.
Ministry of Electronics and IT
National Scholarship Portal
One application for most central scholarships and many state ones. A hard deadline, no late window.
Ask your college for its NSP institute code before you pay the admission fee. Without an active code it cannot verify your application, and the application dies there.
Open NSP ↗ Or see every central and state scheme hereDepartment of Financial Services
PM Vidyalaxmi
An education loan without collateral and without a guarantor. It is not open at every institution: the scheme applies to students admitted to institutions on its own qualifying list, and that list is published on the portal.
Check your institution against that list before you count on this loan, not after you have accepted a seat. If it is not there, the ordinary education loan schemes still apply, and we can walk you through them.
Open PM Vidyalaxmi ↗5. After you join
National Testing Agency
Entrance exams
JEE, NEET, CUET and the rest. Scores, results and the official notifications.
Open NTA ↗Government of India
DigiLocker and the academic depository
Your marksheets and degree, issued digitally and verifiable by any employer. A genuine institution uploads them.
If a college cannot issue your documents into DigiLocker, ask why before you enrol, not after you graduate.
Open DigiLocker ↗Every link on this page was opened on 4 September 2026. Two did not respond to us that day, NCISM and one NAAC sub-page, and we have left them in because they are the correct official addresses. Government portals move; if a link here is broken, tell us and we will fix it, normally within seven days.
If you would rather not do all this
Send us the name. We will do every check on this page.
It takes a family several hours to work through these portals, and most of the documents are PDFs written for officials. That is the job we do, free, and we publish the result so the next family does not have to repeat it.
Our registration numbers are on our Trust Centre, so you can check us the same way you check them.
Questions people actually ask
The six checks families get wrong most often.
How do I check whether an Indian university is recognised?
Open the UGC's consolidated list of universities. A recognised university appears there with an entry number, the state, and usually the year it was recognised. If a name is not on that list, that is not automatically proof of anything: colleges affiliated to a university sit on a different register, and so do the IITs and NITs, so the right check for an affiliated college is whether its parent university is on the list, because the degree comes from the parent.
How do I know whether a university is fake?
The UGC publishes a state-wise list of fake universities: institutions operating without any authority to award a degree. That list is the one check nobody should skip, and it is a different document from the list of recognised universities. An institution has to be absent from the fake list and present on the recognised list. Both are linked on this page and both are free to open.
How do I check whether my own course is approved?
Recognition of the institution and approval of the course are two different things, and a genuine university can run a course its council has not cleared. Thirteen fields have thirteen separate councils, from AICTE for engineering and management to the NMC for medicine, the DCI for dentistry, the PCI for pharmacy, the BCI for law and the CoA for architecture. Each council's own portal is linked on this page, and the check to make is whether the approval names your programme, your campus and the current session.
What does a NAAC grade without a date actually mean?
It means very little. A NAAC accreditation is awarded for a fixed term and has to be renewed, so a grade quoted without its date of declaration and validity is history rather than status. NAAC also moved to Binary Accreditation on 30 June 2024, which records whether an institution is Accredited rather than awarding a letter grade, so many institutions are between the two systems. Ask for the grade, the cycle, the CGPA and the validity date together, or the answer is incomplete.
How do I find out how many seats a college actually has?
Two official routes. AICTE publishes approved institutions with their sanctioned intake, and separately, any institution ranked by NIRF has filed its own PDF with the Ministry of Education, which carries Sanctioned (Approved) Intake for every programme across six years, alongside actual student strength, faculty count and expenditure. If a promise about a seat does not fit inside those numbers, nobody can keep it.
How do I verify my degree after I have joined?
Through DigiLocker and the National Academic Depository, where a recognised institution issues the award digitally so it can be verified by any employer without a paper attestation. Checking that a college actually issues into the depository is a fair question to ask before admission, not after.