The Indian Institute of Planning and Management has been barred by the Delhi High Court from using the words “MBA, BBA, Management Course, Management School, Business School or B-School” in its advertisements.

“In the face of the admission of the senior counsel for… IIPM today that IIPM is not entitled to confer any Degree, the prospectus issued by IIPM showing itself as conferring a Degree, is evidently false and misleading,” the court has remarked in its judgement.

The court has ordered IIPM to immediately remove from its website references to words that suggest it confers a degree recognised by the Indian educational system.

In December 2013, IIPM had promised the Delhi High Court to stop suggesting in its advertisements that it was offering a management degree, and the court found IIPM to be in violation of the promise. The court decided to not punish the institute or its officials for this breach of trust, but asked it to put up the new judgement along with an apology prominently on the IIPM website.

The order has come in response to a public interest litigation filed by B Mahesh Sharma, editor of Careers 360 magazine. Sharma had contented that the University Grants Council and the All India Council for Technical Education had failed to take any action against IIPM.

IIPM had claimed that it was affiliated to the International Management Institute, Brussels, and it was their degrees that it gave to its students. However, the court found that that the institute in Brussels was set up by IIPM’s dean Arindam Chaudhuri and his father Malay Chaudhuri.

The judgement (.pdf) notes, “misguiding young minds who have a craze for “foreign education” in the hope it will open doors for international placements/employments and cleverly concealing from them that IMI, Belgium is nothing but an alter ego or another face of IIPM.”

The court said that the IIPM educational structure was “a maze created… to entrap students to enlist with it in the hope of acquiring a qualification which IIPM is not entitled to confer…”

The judgement also says that current or former students of the institute would be free to take legal action against it for having been misled by such advertisements.