Universities in India — cost, ranking, list of the best universities in India and other important information for students applying to Indian universities.
India's university sector ranges from specialist engineering institutes such as the IITs, NITs and IIITs to broad multidisciplinary universities. The technical institutes offer a concentrated, highly competitive environment in which written examinations and internal ranking carry considerable weight. English is the teaching language across the main technical routes open to international students, removing the need for a national-language preparation year. The decisive choice is between a specialist institute and a broad university, because they differ in academic culture, entrance route and how much freedom students have beyond the chosen field.
What you are choosing between
The Indian answer
Top-ranked institution
IIT Delhi, 118th in QS World University Rankings 2027[1], up from 123rd in the 2026 edition[2]
Depth of the ranked field
52 Indian institutions in QS 2027, 13 of them IITs[1]; 143 in THE World University Rankings 2027, second only to the United States[3]
Public tuition, international rate
3,500 USD/semester for a B.Tech at IIT Bombay in 2026/27, against 1,167 USD/semester for Indian nationals[4]
NIT and IIIT tuition, international rate
4,300 USD to enrol through DASA — a non-refundable 300 USD registration fee plus 4,000 USD of first-semester tuition; SAARC nationals pay 2,300 USD, and every later semester is billed by the institute[5]
Route into the IITs
Direct registration for JEE Advanced without sitting JEE Main; foreign-national seats are supernumerary, capped at up to 10% per program[6]
Route into NITs, IIITs and GFTIs
The DASA scheme on a JEE Main score, with 75% aggregate or 7.5 CGPA in Class XII; seats capped at 15%[5]
Language of instruction
English, in every IIT program and at every DASA institute[7][5]
Living budget
About 400 USD/month on the Study in India portal's own estimate: 150 USD accommodation, 100 USD food, 45 USD transport and 105 USD for everything else
Student visa
Online as an e-Student visa for nationals of e-Visa-eligible countries, valid one year from grant with multiple entries, or through an Indian mission; both are issued against an admission letter[8], and a student visa of more than 180 days needs FRRO registration within 14 days of arrival[9]
Work rights
None. Full-time and part-time employment are prohibited on a student visa[10]; only internships written into the program are allowed[11]
International students in the country
58134 from 173 countries in 2023/24; the largest groups come from Nepal (24.1%), the UAE (7.0%), the United States (5.9%), Bangladesh (5.9%), Nigeria (5.5%) and Zimbabwe (4.0%)[12]
Studying abroad doesn’t break the bank anymore
Universities for any budget
Scholarship options
Installment plans up to 2 years
from5,482 ₽per month
What India offers an international student
IIT engineering at 3,500 USD a semester
IIT Bombay charges foreign-national undergraduates 3,500 USD/semester in 2026/27, or roughly 7,001 USD a year for a B.Tech[4]. Held at that rate, the eight semesters of a four-year degree come to about 28,003 USD in tuition, before hostel, mess and the one-time entry charges set out in the cost section below.
No language detour before the degree begins
English is the medium of instruction at every NIT, IIIT, IIEST and government-funded technical institute that admits international candidates through DASA[5], and in every IIT program[7]. Neither route asks you to learn Hindi or a regional language first, so there is no preparatory language year to fund before the degree starts.
A ranked field second only to the United States
THE World University Rankings 2027 lists 143 Indian institutions, more than any country except the United States[3], and QS 2027 lists 52[1]. The practical consequence is a deep second tier — you are not limited to four household names when you build a shortlist by QS position.
Supernumerary seats keep you out of the domestic queue
Foreign nationals are not placed in the Indian merit queue. Seats in this category are created on top of the domestic intake rather than taken out of it, at the IITs[6] and at the NITs and IIITs alike[5]. You compete inside that quota rather than against the whole country.
A government scholarship that pays a monthly stipend
ICCR's Atal Bihari Vajpayee General Scholarship Scheme is fully funded rather than a partial waiver: it pays the institute's tuition and adds a monthly stipend, a house-rent allowance and an annual contingency grant[13], and this particular scheme is offered with return airfare[14]. You apply through an Indian diplomatic mission on the A2A portal rather than to a university, so the closing date is the mission's, not the institute's.
What studying in India demands of you
An entrance exam you cannot substitute
There is no route into the top tier on transcripts alone. IIT admission runs through JEE Advanced, which foreign nationals, and OCI/PIO candidates applying as foreign nationals, register for directly[6]. NITs and IIITs need a JEE Main score plus at least 75% aggregate or 7.5 CGPA across five Class XII subjects including mathematics and physics, and the ranking is built on the JEE Main rank alone, not on an international test such as the SAT[5].
No paid work, so the whole budget must exist upfront
An Indian student visa carries no work rights: full-time and part-time employment are both prohibited[10], and the only work-like activity allowed is an internship or industrial training that is part of the prescribed curriculum[11]. That makes India unusual among low-fee destinations — tuition, hostel fees and roughly 400 USD/month of living costs all have to be funded before you land, with no term-time earnings to fall back on.
A classroom built around exams rather than seminars
At the IITs assessment runs on repeated written examinations. IIT Kanpur, for example, sets two mid-semester examinations and an end-semester examination every semester alongside quizzes and home assignments, leaves the weighting of each to the course instructor, and usually awards letter grades on relative performance — percentile marks rather than raw marks — which then feed a cumulative point index[15]. If you come from a coursework-and-seminar system, pull the course handbook for your specific program and check how the marks split between continuous assessment and the final paper before you commit.
Not everything calling itself a university is one
The University Grants Commission's fake-universities list, updated in February 2026, names 32 unrecognised institutions across 12 states and union territories, with 12 of them in Delhi alone[16]. A degree from a listed body is void for employment and for further study. Check the list and the institution's accreditation before paying any deposit to a private provider.
In the QS World University Rankings 2027 India's flagships are IIT Delhi at 118, IIT Bombay at =134 and IIT Madras at 170, followed by IIT Kharagpur at 205 and by IISc Bangalore and IIT Kanpur, which share =221[1]. India's own yardstick, the Ministry of Education's National Institutional Ranking Framework, ranks only Indian institutions and scores them on teaching, learning and resources, research and professional practice, graduation outcomes, outreach and inclusivity, and perception[17], publishing 17 separate tables in its 2025 edition, from engineering, management and medical to law, pharmacy and agriculture[18]. That edition, India Rankings 2025, was still the latest on 30 September 2026, and it reads the same names in a different order: IIT Madras first overall, then IISc, IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi and IIT Kanpur[19]. The list below links each Indian university to its UniPage profile: treat it as a directory, and use the NIRF table for your own field as the ranking.
Institute application with GATE or the institute's own written test. NITs, IIITs and other government-funded institutes run a separate postgraduate DASA round that asks international candidates for 60% or 6.00 CGPA in the first degree plus a GRE of 280 on verbal and quantitative combined — no GATE score needed[20]
IIM Ahmedabad admits foreign passport holders on a supernumerary quota with a GMAT score rather than through CAT — 645 on the Focus Edition or 700 on the previous format, then an interview[21]. Other business schools set their own international route, so check each one
Research proposal, a supervisor who accepts you, institute entrance test (RET or the department's own paper)
MBBS (medicine)
5.5 years
NEET-UG, the single national entrance test for every MBBS seat in the country, private colleges included[22]
Unlike many education systems in Europe, the DASA route does not ask you to legalize or apostille your school file: its brochure asks for mark sheets for Classes 10, 11 and 12, with the qualifying-exam marks self-attested, a school certificate confirming completion of Classes 11 and 12, an authenticated English or Hindi translation of any document in another language, and the originals at admission, where the institute itself verifies them[5]. What it does ask for is equivalence: a foreign school-leaving qualification has to be recognised as matching the Indian 10+2 stage. Several boards are pre-equated and need no paperwork, and for the rest CUET-UG requires a UGC equivalence certificate while DASA works from the Association of Indian Universities list[5]. There is no national English threshold either. The JEE Advanced and DASA brochures set no IELTS or TOEFL requirement at all[7][5], while an institute admitting through the Study in India programme accepts the score it asks for in IELTS or TOEFL, or a pass in its own English aptitude test. ICCR expects its scholars to follow lectures in English without difficulty and to be ready to prove it[13].
The route you use depends on the institution. Foreign nationals, and OCI/PIO candidates applying as foreign nationals, register directly for JEE Advanced without sitting JEE Main[6]. NITs, IIITs and other government-funded technical institutes admit on a JEE Main score through the DASA scheme, coordinated for the 2026/27 cycle by IIEST Shibpur; the IITs do not take part in it[5]. Central universities use CUET-UG, which can be sat at centres outside India. Each route keeps its own timetable, set out step by step in the admission calendar further down, and how the Indian education system is structured explains the school stages that feed into all of them.
India registered 1289 universities, 48246 colleges and 15221 standalone institutions for the 2023/24 national survey, so the legal category matters more than the word on the gate[12]. Institutes of National Importance are the elite tier: the hardest to enter, and the holders of the country's main research budgets. The University Grants Commission is the body that recognises universities, inspects the private sector and names the bogus ones. A bill that would merge the UGC, AICTE and the teacher-training council into a single higher-education commission was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 15 December 2025 and referred to a joint parliamentary committee the next day; on 30 September 2026 it was still listed as in committee, so none of it is in force and the UGC remains the authority you check an institution against[23].
Type of educational institution
Features
Number of institutions
Standalone vocational institutes
Short applied programs: Industrial Training Institutes, polytechnics, nursing and teacher-training institutes;
Award diplomas and certificates rather than degrees.
15221
Colleges, government and private
Teach undergraduate and some postgraduate programs;
Award the degree of the university they are affiliated to, not their own.
48246
Central universities
Financed by the central government through the UGC;
The President of India is their Visitor and signs off on senior appointments.
55, plus 1 central open university
State universities
Receive state funding and are controlled by state governments;
Historically the backbone of the system, now narrowly outnumbered by the private sector.
462, plus 17 state open universities
Deemed-to-be-universities
Not universities by statute, but granted university privileges for their academic standing;
Full autonomy over programs, curriculum, admissions and tuition fees.
Public institutions carry both the prestige and the price advantage. Government funding keeps the fee grid low even at the international rate, and all five top places in the national overall ranking go to public institutes, four IITs and IISc[19]. The trade-off is entry, which is settled by exam rank.
Private universities are the fastest-growing part of the system: state private universities rose from 327 in 2019/20 to 464 in 2023/24, overtaking state public universities to become the largest single category[12].
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IITD). India's highest-placed institution, 118th in QS 2027 after climbing from 123rd[1]. An Institute of National Importance and one of the country's main science and technology centres; the IIT Delhi research directory spans technology, biochemistry, physics and information technology, and undergraduates can join those groups.
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB). The campus sits in Mumbai, the country's financial centre, which shapes its recruiting. IITB ranks joint 134th in QS 2027, one of only three Indian universities inside the global top 200[1].
Every public institution in India publishes two fee grids: one for Indian nationals and a separate, considerably higher one for foreign nationals. Read only the second. The figures below are the published rates from the official 2026/27 admission documents. Each institute revises its fees annually, so treat these as the order of magnitude and re-check the fee-structure page of the specific institution before you transfer anything.
Program
What an international student pays
What sits behind the figure
B.Tech, IIT Bombay
3,500 USD/semester
7,001 USD/year against 1,167 USD/semester for Indian nationals, plus a one-time 187 USD admission fee and a 117 USD refundable deposit[4]
M.Tech, IIT Bombay (non-SAARC)
1,984 USD/semester
2,079 USD/semester once registration, gymkhana and medical charges are added[4]
MBA at IIT Bombay's SJMSOM
5,834 USD/semester
7,963 USD/semester with every compulsory charge included[4]
B.Tech at an NIT or IIIT through DASA
4,300 USD for the first semester
A non-refundable 300 USD registration fee plus 4,000 USD tuition; SAARC nationals pay 2,300 USD, Gulf CIWG candidates 300 USD plus 729 USD[5]
MBA, IIM Ahmedabad
50,000 USD for the two-year program
The rate for the 2026-28 batch, inclusive of tuition and exclusive of personal costs. As of 30 September 2026, IIM Ahmedabad's admission policy for the 2027-29 batch still quotes this figure and says the fee for future batches will be announced later; the application itself costs 200 USD[21]
Private universities
set institution by institution
There is no national grid and no honest band to quote: each private university fixes its own international rate, and a Study in India partner can waive anything from 10% to 100% of it on academic merit. The only usable number is the one on that institute's own fee page
Living costs
about 400 USD/month
150 USD accommodation, 100 USD food and housekeeping, 45 USD transport and 105 USD other, on the Study in India portal's own budgeting guidance
Two traps sit inside these numbers. The first is the one-time entry charges, which land in full before the first semester and rarely appear in a headline fee: a postgraduate entrant at IIT Bombay pays 496 USD of admission fees and a 140 USD refundable deposit on top of the semester bill[4]. The second is the assumption that management education follows engineering pricing: business schools sit in their own bracket, and IIT Bombay's in-house MBA costs almost four times its M.Tech per semester, while the two-year program at IIM Ahmedabad is priced at 50,000 USD for international students. Build the budget from the institute's own fee page, add hostel and mess charges, compulsory insurance and lab fees, and only then compare destinations.
There are no tuition-free seats for international students at Indian universities — everyone pays. What exists instead are two funding routes that can cover most or all of the bill, each with its own catch:
ICCR scholarships. The Indian Council for Cultural Relations runs the Atal Bihari Vajpayee General Scholarship Scheme, which for 2026/27 pays a monthly stipend of 210 USD at undergraduate level, 233 USD for a Master's and 257 USD at PhD level, plus a house-rent allowance of 76 USD/month in a Grade-I city and 64 USD/month elsewhere, and an annual contingency grant of 58 USD for undergraduates, 82 USD for a Master's and 146 USD for PhD scholars[13]. It is filed on the A2A Scholarship Portal, and it only covers institutions empanelled with ICCR, so check that list before you settle on a program.
What ICCR does not cover, and who it will not take. Read the exclusions before you build a plan around it. No ICCR scholarship is awarded for medicine, nursing, physiotherapy and other para-medical courses, law, or five-year integrated degrees such as BA LLB; Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy sit under separate AYUSH schemes. Applicants must be at least 18, and no older than 35 for undergraduate, Master's, certificate and diploma courses or 40 for a PhD. Medical cover is the student's own responsibility, not the Council's, and allowances only start once local formalities and a bank account are done, which takes two to three months — ICCR tells scholars to arrive with about 1,500 USD of their own. Selection is not ICCR's either: the Indian mission in your country picks scholars against the number of slots allotted to that country[13].
Study in India fee waivers. As of 1 October 2026 the government's Study in India portal lists more than 600 partner institutes and more than 8000 courses, and each partner sets its own merit-based waiver worth between 10% and 100% of tuition. The waiver is institute-driven, so the same academic record can be worth a full ride at one partner and nothing at another — apply to several. NRI candidates may use the portal but are not eligible for the Study in India scholarship itself, and DASA admits are advised to register on the portal for a unique ID once a seat is allotted[5]. That ID is not a formality for everyone: an ICCR scholar cannot apply for the student visa without one[13].
Matching an Indian institution to the exam you can sit
Most countries let you pick a university first and work out the entry route afterwards. India reverses that order. The exam you are eligible to sit decides which tier of the system is open to you at all, and your shortlist is whatever survives that filter. So settle the exam question before you write down a single institution name.
The exam
What it actually opens
What it demands of an international candidate
JEE Advanced
The IITs, and a handful of other institutes that admit on the JEE Advanced rank
Foreign nationals, and OCI/PIO candidates applying as foreign nationals, register straight for it without JEE Main, and their seats are supernumerary at up to 10% of each course[6]. Registration in the 2026 cycle cost 100 USD for foreign nationals in SAARC countries and 200 USD elsewhere, rising to 200 and 300 USD at a centre outside India[7]
JEE Main
NITs, IIEST Shibpur, IIITs, Schools of Planning and Architecture and other government-funded technical institutes, through DASA
75% aggregate or 7.5 CGPA across five Class XII subjects including mathematics and physics, and a rank on the Common Rank List. DASA seats are capped at 15% per program, with 5% of an institute's total seats — a third of the DASA quota — ring-fenced for children of Indian workers in the Gulf[5]
CUET-UG
48 of the 55 central universities plus a longer roster of state, deemed and private participants — the whole non-technical public sector
The widest overseas reach of any of these exams: in 2026 it ran at 15 centres abroad — Lagos, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Riyadh, Doha, Kuwait, Manama, Muscat, Kathmandu, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, West Java, Munich and Washington DC. A Class XII taken outside India needs a UGC equivalence certificate, and the fee abroad was 53 USD for up to three subjects plus 21 USD for each extra one, against 12 USD at home
NEET-UG
Every MBBS seat in the country, private colleges included
Foreign nationals, NRIs, OCI cardholders and persons of Indian origin are all eligible, subject to the rules of each state and institution, and there is no parallel international route around it[22]
GMAT
The IIMs, on a supernumerary international quota
IIM Ahmedabad adds 10% extra seats for foreign nationals and takes the GMAT only — a foreign passport holder living in India still cannot enter through CAT. The bar is 645 on the Focus Edition or 700 on the previous format[21]
The institution's own test, or none
Private universities and most deemed-to-be universities
School marks and an interview. Nothing national stands between you and a seat here, which means the quality check is entirely yours to run
The word that does the real work is supernumerary. India's reservation categories — SC, ST, OBC-NCL, EWS — belong to the domestic queue, and foreign-national candidates sit outside them[6]. What decides a DASA seat is your position on the JEE Main Common Rank List among the candidates competing for DASA seats, not among the whole domestic field sitting the same paper. The Gulf ring-fence makes the point sharply — a candidate who qualifies as a child of an Indian worker in the Gulf pays 300 USD plus 729 USD to enrol instead of 4,300 USD, and is placed against a ring-fenced block of seats rather than the whole DASA pool[5].
Below the exam-gated tiers sits the part of the system that will accept you on marks alone, and that is where the judgement has to be sharpest. "Private university" covers 464 state private universities and 82 private deemed-to-be universities. Four checks separate them, and none of them takes long:
Legal standing. Confirm the institution is a recognised university in one of the statutory categories listed above, and that it is absent from the University Grants Commission's register of fake universities.
Programme-level approval. A university's own recognition does not approve its courses. Technical education is regulated by AICTE and medicine by the National Medical Commission[23], so check the programme's approval with the right body, whatever the name over the gate.
Accreditation on the specific program. This is programme-level, not institution-level, and a well-known university can run accredited and unaccredited programs side by side. Ask which of its programs carry National Board of Accreditation status, and in which years.
An independent ranking in the right table. The national framework ranks by category — engineering, management, medical, university, college — so compare a private engineering school against other engineering schools, not against a general-purpose university[18].
Then there is the question of which Indian degrees actually travel. An engineering degree from a program accredited by the National Board of Accreditation at a Tier-I institution travels by treaty — India has been a permanent signatory of the Washington Accord since 13 June 2014, so the other signatories recognise graduates of accredited programs as having met the academic requirement for professional registration, provided you graduated after that date and while the accreditation was live. An MBBS does not travel that way: it gets you to the licensing examination of the country where you want to practise, not past it. Management sits with the employer's opinion, and an IIM is recognised where an unranked private business school is not. The reason an Indian degree is undervalued abroad is usually that whoever reads the CV cannot tell which of 1289 universities it came from — an argument for choosing an institution whose name does that explaining for you.
That gives a shortlist with three bands rather than three names. Reach: one or two IITs through JEE Advanced, accepting that the paper, not your transcript, decides it. Match: four to six NITs and IIITs ordered by the DASA choice list, which is where a realistic JEE Main rank converts into an actual seat. Safe: a CUET central university, or a private university that has survived all four checks above and is a Study in India partner, so the merit waiver can cut the fee. Keep one live option in each band until seats are actually allotted: the routes settle at different points in the summer, and a band you abandoned in March cannot be reopened in August.
Two mistakes can cost an applicant a year, and both are avoidable:
Assuming an international test substitutes for an Indian one. It does not. The DASA brochure ranks candidates on the JEE Main Common Rank List and names no alternative, and the SAT appears nowhere in it[5].
Confusing an overseas address with DASA eligibility. An Indian national needs at least two years of schooling abroad, covering Class XI and XII, within the last eight years, and must have passed that qualification abroad[5].
Life on an IIT or NIT campus: hostel, mess and the placement cell
At the technical institutes daily life is organised around the hostel and its mess, and neither is part of the headline fee. DASA collects only its enrolment fee and the first semester's tuition: hostel charges and other expenses vary from institute to institute, are paid directly to the institute at admission, and DASA takes no responsibility for arranging a room, so check hostel availability with the institute itself before you lock your choices[5]. ICCR scholars are in the same position. The university helps them find a place in its hostel or outside, at their own expense, and a scholar who takes a hostel room cannot leave it before the academic year ends without the university's permission, three months' notice and whatever penalty its rules set[13].
Support for foreign students has a named address. The University Grants Commission's guidelines for admitting international students say every higher-education institution shall have an Office for International Students, keep year-by-year records of its international intake, and publish on its website the seats open to international students in each programme, their fee, the admission process and the eligibility rules[25]. For ICCR scholars the university's International Student Advisor, the ICCR zonal office and the Indian mission at home are the designated contacts for any issue with the scholarship[13].
The placement cell is where foreign nationality starts to matter. At IIT Guwahati a regular student of foreign nationality may sit campus placements but has to tell each company about their nationality; the company decides whether to accept the application, and the work permit is left to the student and the employer to arrange[26]. Taking the job also means leaving India to apply for an employment visa, because a student visa cannot be converted inside the country[27].
Two campuses show how far the facilities can go. The flight laboratory at IIT Kanpur runs three single-engine aircraft — a Piper Super Cub, a Cessna Skylane and a Piper Saratoga — on which students take flight-testing courses, and its gliding centre lets students work towards a glider licence[28]. In Bihar, Nalanda University was re-founded under the Nalanda University Act 2010, a revival the leaders of the 16 East Asia Summit states had endorsed in 2007, and took its first students in September 2014; its 455-acre campus, built between 2017 and 2023, is designed as a net-zero campus. The ancient monastery-university whose name it carries flourished for more than 800 years until the 12th century and drew scholars from China, Korea, Japan, Tibet, Mongolia, Sri Lanka and South East Asia[29].
India teaches on a July-August intake, and the steps below run one after another rather than side by side: an equivalence certificate gates a registration, a registration gates an exam, a result gates a seat, and a seat gates the visa. Miss one link and the whole chain slips a year. As of 30 September 2026 the 2027 cycle was dated only in part. NTA's tentative calendar, published on 16 September 2026, sets JEE Main Session 1 for 22-24 and 28-30 January 2027 and CUET-PG for March 2027, but it ends in March 2027, before the CUET-UG and NEET-UG exams, and no information bulletin had followed[30]; the JEE Advanced and DASA sites still carried only 2026 material[31][32], and the ICCR portal still offered only the 2026-27 registration year[33]. Where no 2027 date exists, a row gives the date the step ran in the 2026 cycle: the sequence repeats each year, the exact days change.
Step
When it runs (2026 cycle unless a 2027 date is given)
What has to be finished by then
Check your school board, start equivalence
September to November, before any portal opens
Find your board on the Association of Indian Universities equated list reproduced in the DASA brochure. If it is missing, apply to AIU now; CUET applicants from a foreign board need the UGC certificate instead[5]
IIM applications for the 2027-29 MBA intake
1 October to 31 December 2026
A GMAT score, two recommendation letters sent by the recommenders themselves, three essays and a 200 USD application fee[21]
JEE Main, two sessions
Session 1 applications 31 October to 27 November 2025, exams 21 to 29 January 2026; Session 2 exams 2 to 8 April 2026[34]. Session 1 of 2027 is tentatively set for 22-24 and 28-30 January 2027[30]
You may sit both sessions; the better of the two scores counts[35], and the resulting Common Rank List is what DASA allots seats on[5]
CUET-UG registration
3 to 30 January 2026, with fee payment closing 31 January
Subject choices locked, up to four test cities picked, and 53 USD paid if you are sitting abroad
NEET-UG, for medicine only
3 May 2026, with a re-examination on 21 June
A separate application from everything above, and the only gate to an MBBS seat[36]
JEE Advanced, for the IITs
Direct registration for foreign nationals 6 April to 2 May, exam on 17 May 2026
Foreign nationals register directly and pay in USD; no JEE Main score required[7]
CUET-UG exam window
11 to 31 May 2026
Admit card downloaded, test city confirmed. Central-university admissions follow on the score
DASA postgraduate round
Registration 13 to 24 June 2026, merit list 4 July, Round-I allotment 10 July, Round-II 21 July
A GRE or GMAT score, the first degree completed or due by 30 September, and 300 USD paid with the application; the 4,000 USD first-semester fee falls due within days of the allotment[20]
DASA undergraduate round
Registration and enrolment fee 28 July to 3 August 2026, choices locked 5 August, Round-I 6 August, Round-II 12 August
The entire 4,300 USD enrolment fee and all documents, uploaded and verified, inside a six-day window. This is the tightest point in the year[5]
Physical reporting at the institute
13 to 18 August 2026
You in India, in person, with the visa already in your passport and the balance of the fee ready to pay[5]
The visa sits outside that table because it cannot be started until you hold an offer. Whether it is issued online as an e-Student visa or by an Indian embassy, high commission or consulate, it is granted against the admission letter[8][9], and an ICCR scholar needs a Study in India portal ID before the visa process can start[13]. Between a seat allotted on 6 August and reporting on 13 August there is one week, so the application has to be prepared against the expected allotment date, not after it.
Frequently asked questions about studying in India
Can I enter an IIT without taking JEE Main?
Yes, if you apply as a foreign national. Foreign nationals register for JEE Advanced directly and skip JEE Main entirely, and so do OCI/PIO cardholders in the foreign-national category, which is compulsory for cards obtained after 4 March 2021 and optional for older ones[6]. JEE Main is needed only if you are applying to NITs, IIITs or other government-funded technical institutes through DASA, which the IITs do not join. Sitting both is possible and is the usual insurance policy, because the two routes run on separate calendars and separate quotas.
Do I need an equivalence certificate for my school qualification?
Often, yes. Indian admission runs on a list of pre-recognised school boards: GCE O and A-level, IGCSE and a set of national boards are already equated with the Indian 10+2 stage, and DASA reproduces the Association of Indian Universities list in its brochure[5]. If your board is missing from it, AIU issues an equivalence certificate — start that early, because institutes ask for it at reporting.
Can I travel on an e-Visa and convert it after arrival?
Not a tourist e-Visa, and you cannot switch to student status after landing on one: MHA rules say you cannot come on a tourist visa and obtain a student visa in India[9]. As of 1 October 2026, however, the e-Visa scheme includes an e-Student visa for nationals of eligible countries — valid one year from grant with multiple entries, and issued against an admission letter from a recognised Indian institution, a parent's letter of support with a bank guarantee or six months of bank statements, and a health-ministry no-objection certificate for medical courses[8]. Otherwise the student visa is issued by an Indian embassy, high commission or consulate. Fees differ by nationality, so check the rate for your own passport. A student visa of more than 180 days requires FRRO registration within 14 days of arrival[9].
Can I stay and work in India after I graduate?
Not on the same visa. A student visa cannot be converted into an employment visa inside the country: if an Indian employer offers you a job, you have to leave, apply for an employment visa at an Indian mission in your home country and re-enter on it[27]. Build that trip and its processing time into any plan that treats an Indian degree as a way into the Indian job market.
Can an international student study medicine in India?
Yes, but MBBS has its own gate. NEET-UG is the common entrance test for every MBBS seat in the country, and foreign nationals, NRIs, OCI cardholders and persons of Indian origin sit it too[22]. Its application and exam date sit apart from the engineering routes, so treat medicine as a separate application track from the outset.
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