A.b.s.m. Institute Of Dental Sciences

A.B. Shetty Memorial Institute of Dental Sciences fills 100 BDS chairs a year at Deralakatte, and almost three quarters of the students who take them travel from outside Karnataka. The fee for every year of both courses is published before the cycle opens, and the counselling authority publishes the rank at which each postgraduate speciality actually closed, so both halves of the decision can be read rather than guessed.

Established in 1985, the institute works out of the Medical Sciences Complex at Deralakatte and awards its degrees through Nitte (Deemed to be University). That status is what routes its dental seats into the national deemed-university counselling pool rather than into Karnataka's own, as the college's BDS admission page sets out. It states that it is recognised by the Dental Council of India and by the Malaysian Dental Council, that it is an affiliate of Okayama University Dental School in Japan, and that it acts as academic mentor to Oman Dental College in the Sultanate of Oman, on its profile page.

Its distinguishing clinical work is craniofacial. Working with the Smile Train Organization in the United States and Cleft Children International in Switzerland, the college treats and researches cleft lip and palate, and it runs a network of 21 rural dental health centres set up from 1991 onwards across a radius of 150 km, per that same profile page. The Limca Book of Records entry it cites there is for a single-day denture camp in which 149 edentulous patients received complete dentures free of charge, a camp format the college says it originated.

Who studies here is worth reading before anything else. Of the 500 students in the five-year programme, 349 are women and 363 come from outside Karnataka, while the three-year postgraduate programme holds 146 students of whom 134 are from outside the state, per the college's NIRF 2025 data submission. The sanctioned intake behind those numbers has been steady in the same filing, 100 undergraduate places and 49 postgraduate ones. A dental college drawing nearly three quarters of its undergraduate roll and more than nine in ten of its postgraduate roll from beyond its own state is competing nationally rather than on local demand.

Both courses are priced in full, year by year, on the university's published schedules, so the cost of a degree here is arithmetic rather than an estimate. The general-category BDS first year totals Rs 6,13,500, made up of Rs 6,00,000 tuition, Rs 6,500 university fee and Rs 7,000 examination fee, followed by Rs 6,07,000 in each of years two, three and four, per the 2026-27 undergraduate fee schedule. No tuition row exists for the fifth year: the BDS programme page puts the course at five years including a 12-month compulsory internship, so only four of them carry a bill.

The postgraduate sheet is the instructive one, because a single college charges four different prices for the same three-year degree. Orthodontics, endodontics, pedodontics, prosthodontics and oral surgery carry tuition of Rs 12,00,000 a year, periodontics Rs 8,00,000, oral medicine Rs 3,00,000 and oral pathology Rs 2,00,000, each with an Rs 8,000 examination fee in every year and a one-time Rs 8,000 university fee that lifts the first-year total above the tuition line, per the postgraduate schedule. All four bands buy the same three-year MDS on the same sheet. What the price ladder tracks is how many NEET-MDS candidates want the chair, and the allotment record below confirms the ladder is reading demand correctly.

Non-resident candidates are billed separately and, for BDS, in dollars: USD 10,800 for the first year, USD 10,650 in each of the next three, plus an examination fee of Rs 7,000 a year, per the NRI undergraduate schedule. The NRI postgraduate sheet stays in rupees and offers only four dental specialities, orthodontics and endodontics at Rs 17,19,000 in the first year and prosthodontics and oral surgery at Rs 16,19,000, per the NRI postgraduate schedule. That sheet prices no other dental speciality, and the allotment record below shows no non-resident candidate taking a pedodontics, periodontology, oral medicine or oral pathology chair either.

There is one door into BDS and the college does not operate it. All 100 chairs are deemed-university seats, so the National Testing Agency's role ends at conducting NEET-UG and passing the all-India rank to the Directorate General of Health Services, which routes the entire intake to the Medical Counselling Committee; registration, choice-locking and allotment all happen there rather than at Deralakatte, as the college's BDS admission page sets out. Management and NRI seats alike are allotted on inter-se NEET-UG merit, so the category changes the pool competed in, never the requirement to have sat the paper.

A candidate must carry 50% across physics, chemistry and biology at Class 12, have taken English as one of the languages, hold a NEET-UG qualification, and have turned 17 by 31 December of the admission year, per that admission page. The document list published alongside it is longer than most applicants expect and includes a physical fitness certificate, a blood group certificate, a migration certificate and photographs at two specified sizes, 35 mm by 45 mm and 20 mm by 25 mm, printed at 300 to 600 dpi. NRI applicants additionally file a sponsor's embassy certificate and, where the sponsor is not a parent, a family tree certified by the tahsildar.

MDS entry runs on NEET-MDS through the same committee, and the choice that decides everything there is the speciality rather than the college, because the eight subjects taught here close at ranks an order of magnitude apart.

No BDS closing rank is fixed in advance and the college publishes none. What exists to read afterwards is the round-wise allotment record, institution by institution and rank by rank, in the Medical Counselling Committee's final allotment result for Round 1 of UG counselling 2026. The college's rows there sit under two quota headings and no others, self-financed merit and non-resident, so the rank to look for is the last one in whichever of those two lists a candidate belongs to.

Both of those lists carry the open seat category, so nothing in that record is a reservation effect: the merit queue and the non-resident queue are two doors to the same chairs, priced differently and entered at very different ranks.

Postgraduate closing ranks are where one college behaves like eight. In the committee's MDS 2025 Round 1 allotment list, oral and maxillofacial surgery took its management and paid-quota candidates from rank 576 down to 1,614, while oral medicine and radiology did not fill until ranks 12,611 and 13,176.

Two things fall out of that table. Oral and maxillofacial pathology, the cheapest speciality on the fee sheet, drew no allotment at all in that round and is missing from the list entirely. And the fee ladder runs with the rank ladder, not against it: the Rs 12,16,000 specialities were allotted between ranks 576 and 5,787, periodontics at Rs 8,16,000 ran down to 9,153, and oral medicine at Rs 3,16,000 to 13,176, reading the postgraduate schedule against the MDS 2025 Round 1 result. A candidate reading only the sticker price would draw exactly the wrong conclusion about which subject is harder to enter.

The college files three years of outcomes for each course, and the undergraduate numbers have been flat rather than rising. Of the 93 students who completed BDS in the stipulated time in 2023-24, 64 were placed at a median of Rs 3,00,000 a year and 29 went on to higher studies, against 66 placed at Rs 3,60,000 the year before and 64 placed at Rs 3,40,000 in 2021-22, per the NIRF 2025 data submission.

Read the two courses against each other before drawing a conclusion. Close to three in ten of every BDS batch is recorded as going to higher studies rather than to a job, 29 of 93 in the most recent year, which is the honest signal that BDS here is treated as the route into MDS rather than as an endpoint. The postgraduate rows say the opposite: 48 of 48 placed in 2023-24 with nobody continuing to further study. Neither median is a starting salary in the sense an engineering table means it, because a dentist's earnings turn on whether a practice gets built, and the framework has no column for that.

The undergraduate places are divided into two lists before counselling opens and into nothing else. Ninety-five of the 100 BDS seats are classed as self-financed merit and five as non-resident, the college filed under Deemed University and both lists carrying the open seat category, in the Medical Counselling Committee's Round 1 seat matrix for NEET UG 2026. There is no all-India pool and no Karnataka state quota to compete for at this address.

Postgraduate seats total 49 in the college's NIRF 2025 data submission, and its admissions listing breaks that total across eight specialities, running from nine chairs down to two. The two specialities holding two seats each, oral medicine and radiology and oral pathology, are also the two the postgraduate fee sheet prices lowest.

The college is placed 6th among dental institutions in India in the 2025 National Institutional Ranking Framework, with an overall score of 69.00, on the Ministry of Education's dental ranking table. Karnataka holds three places in that top ten, and this is the middle one: Manipal College of Dental Sciences, Manipal sits above it at 5th with 70.58 and JSS Dental College and Hospital, Mysuru below at 10th with 62.59, on the same table. The three are close enough on score that the parameters below decide more than the ordering does.

The shape of that scorecard is unusually lopsided. Graduation outcomes at 96.84 and perception at 84.06 are close to the ceiling and are what carry the college into sixth place, while research at 32.18 is under half of either. Read against the sponsored-research figures above, that column is measuring something real: this is a teaching and clinical-service institution that publishes, not a research campus that also teaches. An MDS candidate choosing on thesis supervision should weigh the 32.18 more heavily than the rank.

Ten dental departments run here, and eight of them carry an MDS intake, which is what makes the postgraduate choice a real one rather than a formality.

Public health dentistry has no MDS seat but does much of the work the college is known for. The department dates from 1988 and runs the screening, prophylaxis, restoration and extraction camps that reach the rural network, per its department page. Oral implantology is the other department without a postgraduate seat, and it teaches through a one-year fellowship instead.

Beyond MDS, the college runs one-year fellowships in craniofacial surgery, with five places, and craniofacial orthodontics, with two, both in association with Cleft Children International in Zurich, per the craniofacial surgery and craniofacial orthodontics programme pages. A separate one-year implantology fellowship selects on BDS examination merit and requires each fellow to place 30 implants across defined case types, from single-tooth placement through sinus lifts to a fixed full-mouth rehabilitation, per its programme page.

The number that matters at a dental college is chairs, and this one reports a 425-chair teaching hospital with diagnostic, therapeutic and rehabilitation services on the campus, alongside cone-beam computed tomography, CAD CAM systems, an endodontic surgical microscope, an intraoral scanner, an aligner system and a 3D printer, on its profile page. Average outpatient attendance in the 2023 calendar year was 825 a day, per the NIRF 2025 data submission, which is the closest published proxy for how much patient work a student here will see.

The library sits on the seventh floor of the college building and is stocked for a single discipline rather than for a university. It holds 7,828 books, 2,299 back volumes of journals, 1,179 postgraduate dissertations and 30 doctoral theses, and subscribes to 76 current journals of which 60 are international and 16 national, with membership of the DELNET and HELINET consortia, per the library page. It opens from 8.30 a.m. to 11.00 p.m. on weekdays and extends to midnight in examination season. Spending on it reached Rs 1,22,24,304 in 2023-24, up from Rs 88,05,942 two years earlier, per the NIRF 2025 submission.

The dental college gets its own section of the university's hostel sheet, and it is not a copy of the medical academy's section above it: the two share the same buildings, Sankalp, Abhay and Vishwas for boys and Sneha, Maithri and Satya for girls, but not the same room list. Five room types are priced against it: a double with attached bath at Rs 1,22,000 for the first year, an air-conditioned double at Rs 2,02,000, a single with attached bath in the girls' hostel at Rs 1,59,000, a single air-conditioned postgraduate room at Rs 2,29,000 and a postgraduate suite at Rs 2,72,000, per the 2026-27 hostel fee structure. Every one of those totals bundles the same Rs 52,000 of annual mess charges, and the caution deposit inside them scales with the room, from Rs 20,000 on a double to Rs 60,000 on a suite. That single air-conditioned postgraduate room appears on the sheet only under the dental college.

The conditions attached are worth reading before choosing a room. The caution deposit is returned only at the end of the course, later years' room rent is billed with the college fee, and a boarder may neither vacate nor swap rooms mid-year without written permission from the head of the institution and the assistant director for student affairs, per the college's hostel page. The vegetarian mess is run on cost sharing, with any shortfall against the mess advance made good by the boarders themselves, and non-vegetarian dishes are pre-booked separately.

The college entered 107 faculty members in its ranking submission, a count that has to cover chairside supervision as well as lecture hours, per the NIRF 2025 data submission. Doctoral activity around them is small and mostly part-time: 5 full-time and 37 part-time candidates were on the rolls to 2023-24, and one full-time and four part-time doctorates were awarded that year.

The principal, Prof. Dr. Mithra N. Hegde, was a student in the college's first BDS batch in 1985 and now heads it. Her published record lists 34 years of teaching, 62 postgraduates guided and 128 co-guided, seven doctoral candidates awarded, 441 papers in peer-reviewed journals and four patents, with externally funded work from the Indian Council of Medical Research, the Board of Research in Nuclear Sciences and the Karnataka government's Vision Group on Science and Technology, on her profile page. Her own subject is caries research and the use of saliva as a non-invasive diagnostic tool.

Sponsored research is where the college is thinnest. Three projects ran in 2023-24 with three funding agencies for Rs 3,12,02,771 received, against four projects and Rs 2,07,44,669 in 2021-22, per the NIRF 2025 submission. Formal collaborations exist with Osaka Dental University from 2015, Cleft Child International from 2003 and the Indian Dental Association's national oral cancer registry from 2018, with academic linkages to the Université de Toulouse Paul Sabatier and the Regional Cancer Centre in Thiruvananthapuram, on the collaboration page.

This section names nobody, and that is a sourcing decision rather than a comment on the graduates. No list of notable alumni with a traceable public record is published for this college, and a dentist attested only by a directory entry is not a substitute for one. What is documented is what graduates have given back to this institute specifically: its orthodontics department has been re-equipped by alumni contributing more than 45 lakh rupees, per the university's alumni page. The merit awards and the two endowment lectures counted on that page belong to Nitte's alumni body across all its institutions rather than to this college alone. Anyone needing a particular degree verified should apply to the institute's own records office.

The principal is the one alumna the college names in an official capacity, having entered with the founding batch of 1985 and returned to lead the institute, per her profile.

The college sits in the Medical Sciences Complex at Deralakatte, on the southern edge of Mangaluru in Dakshina Kannada district, sharing a campus with the university's teaching hospital.

Admission questions go to the university admissions desk rather than to the college switchboard, and the college directs applicants there itself from its programme pages.

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