Arulmigu Kalasalingam College Of Pharmacy (inst. Code - 049), Virudhunagar

Arulmigu Kalasalingam College of Pharmacy is a private pharmacy college on the Kalasalingam campus at Krishnankoil in Virudhunagar district, and it is a different institution from Kalasalingam Academy of Research and Education, the deemed university it shares that campus with. The distinction decides how you get in: this college's government seats are allotted by Tamil Nadu's medical selection committee, which has put 65 B.Pharm seats here into its second counselling round for 2026-27. The college stood 96th in the 2025 national pharmacy ranking.

The college was started in 1988 at Krishnankoil by Kalasalingam and Anandam Ammal Charities, through the efforts of founder-chairman T. Kalasalingam, according to the founder's message on its site. It became a degree college in 1992, began postgraduate teaching in 2003 and added the six-year Doctor of Pharmacy (Pharm.D) in 2016. That message also names the two bodies the college answers to, the Pharmacy Council of India (PCI) for approval and The Tamil Nadu Dr. M.G.R. Medical University in Chennai for its degrees, and the college homepage repeats both together with 1988 as the founding year.

In the national higher education survey, AISHE, the college carries the code C-45757, and that code sits against its name in the PM-Vidyalaxmi institution list circulated by the State Bank of India. The survey classes it as a private un-aided affiliated college in a rural location. It teaches only pharmacy.

Kalasalingam College of Pharmacy Is Not KARE

The Kalasalingam name is on several separate institutions near Krishnankoil, and their numbers get mixed up online. Kalasalingam Academy of Research and Education (KARE) is a deemed-to-be university. Its NAAC grade, its university and engineering rankings and its research output belong to KARE, not to this college. Arulmigu Kalasalingam College of Education is another separate college.

What ties the two together is day-to-day campus life, not any legal merger. The college's own hostel page says its students can live in any of the KARE hostels, its sports page says they use the university's sports facilities, and its MoU register lists a memorandum with KARE signed in April 2017. Degrees, though, come from the Chennai medical university, and admission to government seats runs through the state.

Five qualifications are taught, and the latest PCI decision letter on the college site approves an intake for each one except the doctorate. That letter, communicated on 2 September 2024, is posted as the PCI approval order and extends approval up to the 2024-2025 session.

The B.Pharm intake was 60 until PCI approved a rise to 100 from the 2023-24 session, in a letter of 22 August 2023. The courses page also lists a three-year lateral-entry B.Pharm for diploma holders and a Ph.D in pharmaceutical sciences under the university's norms. There is no Pharm.D Post Baccalaureate here, and no M.Pharm in Pharmacognosy or Pharmacy Practice.

What the State Fixes, and What It Does Not

The college publishes no fee structure of its own on its website. For seats filled through state counselling, the fee is set by Tamil Nadu's Fee Committee and printed in each 2026-27 prospectus of the Selection Committee:

The D.Pharm and regular B.Pharm figures are all-inclusive of tuition, laboratory, library and similar heads. The lateral-entry, M.Pharm and Pharm.D figures are printed as tuition, and the M.Pharm and Pharm.D prospectuses add other fees on top. The D.Pharm and both B.Pharm prospectuses state that hostel, transport and mess are extra. For the college's own management seats, neither the college site nor the state's documents give a fee, so that price has to be asked for at the admission office.

Hostel can cost more than the B.Pharm fee itself, and the rates the college's site lists are those of the KARE hostels. The hostel page lists a year in a three-bedded non-AC room without an attached bathroom at Rs 59,500 with the normal or North Indian mess, rising to Rs 1,09,500 for a three-bedded AC room with an attached bathroom and the special mess.

Admission follows two tracks. Government-quota seats are allotted by the Selection Committee of the Directorate of Medical Education and Research in Chennai, ranked on Class 12 marks for B.Pharm and Pharm.D and on the committee's own entrance test for M.Pharm. The remaining seats are the college's management quota, and for those the college names an admission committee on its committees page but publishes no application process.

Two rules in the 2026-27 B.Pharm prospectus decide who can take a state B.Pharm seat here. Only 65% of a non-minority self-financing college's seats go into the government pool. Those are for Tamil Nadu natives with a nativity certificate, which a family from another state cannot claim; the one exception is a non-native who studied Class 6 to 12 in Tamil Nadu, who is considered under the open category. An applicant from Kerala or Andhra Pradesh who schooled at home is therefore outside the state pool, and the college's 2026 NIRF submission counts 133 of its 317 undergraduates as coming from outside Tamil Nadu and 10 from outside India.

The college's courses page sets its own B.Pharm floor at 50% aggregate in physics, chemistry and biology or mathematics at the plus-two level, and 40% for SC and ST candidates. Its M.Pharm seats ask for a B.Pharm from the Chennai medical university or an equivalent. On the government quota, M.Pharm places are filled from the state's own entrance examination rather than GPAT, as the 2026-27 M.Pharm prospectus sets out, with half of the seats in each branch kept for service candidates.

Where the 2026 Cycle Stands for This College

The dates below come from the Selection Committee's own notices:

• B.Pharm: round 1 allotted government colleges only, and round 2 is the one that allots government-quota seats in self-financing colleges such as this one, per the round 2 schedule. Registration and choice locking were extended to 16 September 2026, with results on 18 September, per the extension notice.
• Pharm.D: the government-quota allotment was published on 10 September 2026, in the provisional allotment list.
• M.Pharm: the first-round result is due on 15 September 2026 and allotment orders can be downloaded until 19 September, per the M.Pharm schedule.
• D.Pharm: the 10 September diploma allotment covered government medical colleges only and names no candidate here, in the diploma allotment list.

Pharm.D is the only course at this college with a published 2026 closing mark so far. The Selection Committee's allotment of 10 September 2026 placed 20 candidates here, with Class 12 merit totals out of 200 running from 182 at general rank 615 down to 151.5 at general rank 5808.

No candidate from the OC community was allotted a Pharm.D seat here. Community is the only label the list prints beside each name. It does not show whether a seat came from the open compartment or a reserved one, so a BC candidate in the table may hold an open seat, and the marks are a guide to the competition rather than official category closing marks.

For B.Pharm and M.Pharm there is no 2026 figure yet, because neither course has been allotted at this college. The B.Pharm allotment of 3 September 2026 filled government colleges only and does not list this campus. A B.Pharm closing mark will first exist when the round 2 result is out.

Graduate outcomes are best documented in the data the college files for the national ranking. Its 2026 NIRF submission reports these figures for the latest three batches of each programme:

Not every graduate is accounted for. Of the 58 B.Pharm graduates of 2024-25, 35 were placed and 14 went on to study, which leaves nine with neither outcome recorded. In the M.Pharm batch of the same year, 17 of 31 were placed and two went to higher study. The six-year Pharm.D median sat at Rs 3,00,000 for all three batches, below the two-year M.Pharm median in each year.

The college has revised its own B.Pharm numbers between filings. For the batch graduating in 2023-24, the 2025 submission reported 37 placed at a median of 2,75,000 rupees, and the 2026 submission reports 34 placed at 2,88,000. The 2022-23 batch went from 40 placed to 33 in the same two documents. Neither filing explains the change, so use the 2026 figures as the college's latest word and distrust any placement number quoted without its filing year.

Who Recruits on Campus

The placement page lists campus drives from March 2019 onward, and the pattern is retail and hospital pharmacy for diploma and Pharm.D students and manufacturing or healthcare services for B.Pharm students. Recurring names include Apollo Hospitals Enterprise at Madurai, MedPlus, SuperMed Pharmacy, Mylan Laboratories (a Viatris company) in Bengaluru, SKN Organics in Chennai, Billroth Hospitals and Omega Healthcare. HCL Technologies held a B.Pharm drive at Madurai in December 2020. The list stops at early 2024 and gives no selection counts.

An older report on the campus interview page shows the kind of result a single drive can deliver: in August 2016, Apollo Hospitals interviewed 23 D.Pharm students for trainee pharmacist posts and selected 22.

The Selection Committee's vacancy tables show how many seats at this college the state fills, course by course, for 2026-27:

For M.Pharm, the state lists 25 government-quota seats here: 7 in Pharmaceutics, 7 in Pharmaceutical Chemistry, 6 in Pharmacology and 5 in Pharmaceutical Analysis, in the M.Pharm vacancy position of 7 September 2026. Those tables give only a seat count per branch, with no community split.

The M.Pharm is the course that has struggled to fill. The college's 2026 NIRF submission records 17 first-year M.Pharm admissions in 2022-23 and 31 in 2023-24, and the 2025 submission records just 7 in 2020-21. The sanctioned-intake table in those filings gives 37 M.Pharm places, although the 2026 filing's own placement table shows an intake of 51 for 2021-22, the same total as the four branches in the PCI decision letter. Check the branch you want is actually running before you lock it as a choice.

B.Pharm demand looks steadier. In the same 2026 submission, the college admitted 55 of 60 first-year places in 2019-20, 57 in 2020-21 and 51 in 2021-22, with four to eight diploma holders joining the second year each time through lateral entry.

The college has appeared in the NIRF pharmacy table in each edition since 2022. A higher score did not protect its position: 42.15 in 2025 earned 96th place, where 41.58 had been enough for 82nd in 2024.

Every parameter except perception scored higher in 2025 than in 2022, and graduation outcomes rose in each edition, from 42.17 to 57.71. Perception, the peer and employer survey, fell from 84.69 to 31.16 over the same run, and research never rose above 3.09. The college does not appear in the NIRF pharmacy tables from 2017 to 2021, and no 2026 pharmacy table has been published yet.

On paper the research effort is bigger than that score suggests. For 2024-25 the college reported 82,09,000 rupees from 7 sponsored projects and 11,47,000 rupees from 14 consultancy assignments in its 2026 submission, with 5 patents published and 2 granted during calendar 2024. No Ph.D student graduated in any of the three years it covers, although 23 full-time and 8 part-time scholars were enrolled.

Most of the big-ticket facilities belong to the shared Kalasalingam campus, so it helps to separate those from what the college runs itself. The pharmacy-specific ones are its laboratories, library, animal house, medicinal garden and a hospital practice site.

• Laboratories: the Pharmaceutical Analysis department lists an ultra fast liquid chromatograph, an HPLC, FT-IR, a Karl Fischer titrator and a fluorimeter on its department page. Pharmaceutics has a 10-station tablet punching machine, a stability chamber and Franz diffusion cells, per its page.
• Library: 6249 books across 2860 titles, 35 international journals, 98 e-journals and access to 3272 journals through the e-consortium, open 9 am to 5 pm, per the library page.
• Animal house: a centralised facility of 200 square metres, per the animal house page.
• Medicinal garden: the Pharmacognosy department's page counts almost 175 medicinal plants from more than 89 genera, looked after by the students themselves.
• Hospital practice: the Pharmacy Practice department, set up in 2015, runs a clinical pharmacy practice centre at Government District Head Quarters Hospital, Virudhunagar, where Pharm.D students join ward rounds and counsel patients, per the department page.

Spending in the 2026 NIRF submission shows where money went in 2024-25: 44,03,195 rupees on new laboratory equipment and 19,40,318 rupees on the library, against 8,81,42,639 rupees on salaries.

Shared Campus Facilities

The college's site also lists facilities that serve the wider Kalasalingam campus, with bus seats booked through KARE's own portal. A fleet of 40 buses and two vans runs from Madurai, Sivakasi, Rajapalayam, Virudhunagar, Tenkasi and Theni, per the transport page. The health centre has 30 beds and a round-the-clock ambulance. There is a 50 m by 25 m eight-lane swimming pool that charges Rs.500 a month, per the swimming pool page, and the university's sports arena covers 10 acres with a 400-metre track, per the sports page. Men get four hostels and women three, all KARE's.

The college's 2026 NIRF submission names 45 teachers, all on regular appointments. Most of them are recent hires: 30 of the 45 joined in 2023 or 2024, the period in which the B.Pharm intake rose from 60 to 100.

By qualification, 24 hold a Ph.D, 14 a master's in pharmacy and seven a Pharm.D, all seven of them assistant professors, in the same 2026 filing. The longest-serving teacher on the roster, V. Mahendran, an associate professor, joined in July 1999. The faculty list on the college's website is older than the filing and still names several teachers who are not on the 2026 roster, so rely on the filing.

The principal is Dr. N. Venkateshan, who studied B.Pharm and M.Pharm at this college and took his Ph.D from the Chennai medical university in 2011, per his profile page. He received the university's Best Teacher Award in 2012 and has served on its Board of Studies in Pharmacy. The 2026 roster gives his joining date as 1 June 2016.

The postal address is Anand Nagar, Krishnankoil, Srivilliputtur (Via), Virudhunagar District, Tamil Nadu, PIN 626 126, with the office phone (04563) 289006 and the email akcpprl@yahoo.com, per the college homepage. The same page describes the campus as 65 km south of Madurai and 10 km north of Srivilliputhur on the Madurai to Senkottai National Highway.

The official records do not agree on what to call the place. The PCI letters of 2023 record the village as Kunnur in Srivilliputhur sub-district, and the NIRF 2025 table lists the city as Srivilliputtur. The college's own founder's message puts the campus 60 km from Madurai on 350 acres, against the 65 km and 230 acres on its homepage.

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