College Of Pharmaceutical Sciences

Andhra University prints no rupee figure for a pharmacy seat anywhere on its own website. Andhra Pradesh does, on the last-rank sheet its higher education council publishes after counselling, and there the B.Pharm at this college carries a college fee of Rs 29,900 against a Pharm.D fee of Rs 68,000. The College of Pharmaceutical Sciences finished 31st on the national pharmacy ranking for 2025, and its own most recent filing shows all four of its programmes admitting fewer students than the year before.

Pharmacy is older at Andhra University than the college that now teaches it. The university began a pharmacy programme in 1937, second in the country to do so at university level, running it first inside the B.Sc. Honours degree in chemical technology and then as a specialisation in the M.Sc. A separate department followed in 1951 when the B.Pharm started under Prof. S. Rangaswamy as founder head, the M.Pharm in 1954, and a Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences in 1975. Only in August 2006 was the department elevated to a constituent college of Andhra University. The two names it answers to are both live in official records: its NIRF 2025 return is filed as AU College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Andhra University under the identifier IR-P-I-1450, while the following year's data capture on the university's own site is headed College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, IR-P-C-24055. Searching one name will not find the other.

Two claims on its own page are worth carrying into any comparison, because both are firsts rather than superlatives. The college says it was the first in the country to start a pharmaceutical biotechnology division, which is still one of its eight master's specialisations, and it has hosted the Indian Pharmaceutical Congress three times, in 1977, 1995 and 2016.

One caution before you address a letter to that office. The college's own page carries two different principals: the Principal's Desk block at the top names Prof. G. Girija Shankar with the phone number and email above, while the profile text under it, and the faculty roll in the college's NIRF 2026 filing, record Prof. Y. Rajendra Prasad in the post. Ring the number before you write to a name.

Four taught programmes and a doctorate make up the whole list, and the only real subject choice sits at master's level. Andhra University's course register carries B.Pharm over four years, Pharm.D over six, and twelve M.Pharm entries of two years each, covering pharmaceutical technology, analysis and quality assurance, pharmaceutical chemistry, biotechnology, pharmaceutics, pharmacognosy, pharmacology, pharmacy practice and regulatory affairs. The college describes that spread as eight specialisations; the register runs longer because it keeps pre-2020 and post-2020 syllabus versions of some subjects on separate rows, marked AB 2020 onwards. A three-year Pharm.D (Post Baccalaureate) runs alongside them, admitted through the state postgraduate test rather than named on the register.

Now the money, and the university is the wrong place to look for it. The pharmacy entry in its fee-payment portal asks a student to key in a figure the site itself never states, above a line reading contact the Principal Office before paying your college fee for fee details. Its UGC public self-disclosure carries a link headed Prospectus and Program Fee Structure, and that link opens the Directorate of Admissions front page, which publishes notices for engineering, management and doctoral entry and nothing at all for pharmacy.

The figure exists, and the state prints it. On the council's last-rank sheet for the 2023 admission cycle, the university pharmacy seat carries a college fee of Rs 29,900 and the self-finance Pharm.D seat a college fee of Rs 68,000. Those two lines are the only published prices for a taught seat here, and the gap between them is the thing to plan around: the six-year clinical degree is charged at more than twice the four-year one, and the sheet books it under a self-finance heading rather than the university one.

Doctoral fees are published properly, in the university's own admission brochure. A research place costs Rs 75,000 a year in the executive category and Rs 25,000 a year in the extramural category across the science, arts, engineering, pharmacy and law faculties, with Rs 500 library fee, Rs 1,000 counselling and admission fee, and Rs 2,000 examination fee waived for anyone holding an M.Pharm, M.Tech, M.Phil or LL.M.

Nothing about entry is decided on this campus, and the undergraduate and postgraduate doors are run by two different bodies. B.Pharm and Pharm.D seats are filled from AP EAPCET, whose agriculture and pharmacy stream is conducted by JNT University Kakinada on behalf of the Andhra Pradesh State Council of Higher Education. That paper is heavily biological rather than mathematical: 160 questions in all, 80 in biology split evenly between botany and zoology, 40 in physics and 40 in chemistry, each carrying one mark, sat online in English or Telugu. The application fee is set by category: Rs 800 open, Rs 750 BC, Rs 700 SC and ST.

What ranks you is not the test alone. The council builds the merit list by giving 75% weightage to the normalised AP EAPCET score and 25% to the group subjects in the qualifying examination, so a strong Intermediate sheet is a quarter of the rank before the entrance is written. Eligibility asks for 45% of marks in the specified subjects taken together, or 40% for a reserved-category candidate, and candidature is restricted to candidates who belong to Andhra Pradesh and satisfy its local and non-local status rules.

Age is where the two undergraduate routes part company, and it catches Pharm.D applicants out. B.Pharm requires only that a candidate has completed 16 years by the date admission commences, with no upper age limit at all. Pharm.D sets a floor of 17 years on 31 December of the admission year and a ceiling of 35 years, relaxed by three years for SC, ST and BC candidates and by five years for disabled candidates. Pharm.D also accepts a second qualification the B.Pharm route does not: a diploma in pharmacy from the Andhra Pradesh State Board of Technical Education and Training, or an examination recognised as equivalent, in place of the 10+2.

The postgraduate door is stranger, because Andhra University sits on both sides of it. AP PGECET 2026 is conducted by Andhra University, Visakhapatnam on behalf of APSCHE for admission into M.Tech, M.Pharm and Pharm.D (Post Baccalaureate) courses, so an M.Pharm applicant here writes a paper set by the university they are applying to. The pharmacy paper runs as a computer-based test of 120 multiple-choice questions for 120 marks, in English only, with no negative marking, and the entry bar is a relevant bachelor's degree with at least 50% marks, or 45% for a reserved-category candidate.

Do not read that as a PGECET-only route, because the state test is second in the queue. While filling seats, first preference goes to candidates qualified in GATE or GPAT in the relevant branch on their test scores, and only the seats left unfilled are given to APPGECET rank holders. Reservation by domicile bites harder at this level too: 85% of the seats in each course are reserved for local candidates and 15% are unreserved. A GPAT score is therefore the strongest thing an out-of-state M.Pharm applicant can bring, and it still has to clear the local-status arithmetic.

Two published thresholds decide whether you get a rank at all, and neither of them gets you a seat. AP EAPCET qualifies at 25% of the maximum marks considered for ranking, with no minimum prescribed for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe candidates, and AP PGECET at 25%, which the booklet spells out as 30 marks out of 120. Allotment is a separate office from the paper: the AP EAPCET convener is not responsible for the allotment of seats, which falls to the Commissioner of Technical Education as Convener for the Admissions.

What closing ranks exist are on the council's own last-rank sheet, and finding this college in it takes local knowledge. The Andhra Pradesh sheet does not file the seats under the college's own name; it carries them as two Visakhapatnam entries affiliated to Andhra University under the institution codes AUCP for the university B.Pharm seat and AUCPSF for the self-finance Pharm.D seat.

Read the two columns for their shape rather than their exact values. Pharm.D closes at the identical pair of ranks in every filled category, 93546 for boys and 149033 for girls, which is what a course looks like when counselling works its way to the bottom of the queue and reservation never becomes the binding constraint. B.Pharm behaves differently: ST, BC-A, BC-C and BC-E boys all closed at 50920, the same rank as open-category boys, while the SC columns ran out past 147000. Figures circulating for cycles after 2023 have no published allotment behind them yet, so nothing binds except the phase-wise allotment order you are actually sitting in.

Postgraduates here get placed and undergraduates mostly do not, and the college's own filings say so plainly. The most recent batch, graduating in 2024-25, is below.

The B.Pharm row is the volatile one, and three years of it should temper any single-year reading. Of the 48 who finished in minimum time, 8 were placed in 2022-23 against 40 going to higher study, 35 were placed in 2023-24 against 10, and 19 were placed in 2024-25 against 25. The median held at Rs 4,00,000 through all three. A four-year pharmacy degree that sends between a fifth and five-sixths of a class onward rather than into work is behaving normally, but it means the placement percentage you were quoted depends entirely on which year somebody picked.

The master's programmes are the steady half. 92 of 98 were placed in 2022-23, 90 of 98 in 2023-24 and 80 of 97 in 2024-25, with the median rising from Rs 4,20,000 to Rs 4,50,000 and holding there. Both Pharm.D routes sit at the same Rs 4,50,000 median, and the three-year post-baccalaureate cohort has placed 11 of 11 in two of its last three years, on a cohort small enough that a single student swings the percentage several points.

No recruiter list exists to check any of that against. Follow the Training and Placement Cell entry on the pharmacy page and it lands on the university-wide Career Planning and Development Centre. Its published content is a staff roll, a dean, four associate deans and two placement officers; beyond that it names no recruiter, dates no drive and states no package.

Every programme shrank in 2024-25, and the cuts were not marginal. The two most recent filings put the four intakes side by side.

The B.Pharm figure of 40 matches the regulator's number exactly. The Pharmacy Council of India's register of approved degree institutions carries this college under file number 151 for Andhra Pradesh and extends approval up to the 2025-2026 academic session for 40 admissions. Note also that a sanctioned seat is not the same as a head in the classroom: the 48 B.Pharm students graduating each year include six admitted by lateral entry in the year after first year.

Doctoral seats are counted separately and are scarce. The Directorate of Admissions' seat table for the executive and extramural research round offers three places in this college, one each in pharmaceutical technology, pharmaceutical biotechnology, and pharmacognosy and phytochemistry, with applications downloadable from 12 April 2026 and counselling held on 30 April.

The rank moved twice in three years and the score barely moved at all, which is the whole story of this college's national standing. It placed 22nd with 58.10 in NIRF 2023, fell to 34th with 56.11 in 2024, and recovered to 31st with 58.19 in 2025. The 2025 score sits fractionally above the 2023 one and the college is nine places lower for it, which means the field around it improved while it held still.

One row explains the fall and a different row explains the recovery. Perception dropped from 73.38 to 42.99 between the 2023 and 2024 tables and has stayed there, which is what took twelve places off the rank while teaching and graduation outcomes were both quietly improving. Outreach and inclusivity then climbed from 60.52 to 70.17 in a single year, and that is most of the three places it won back.

Research is the flat line, and an applicant should treat it as the load-bearing weakness rather than a rounding detail. Nothing in the pharmacy top 40 scores lower on research and professional practice than its 22.49. Nirma University, one rank behind at 32, records 42.87; GITAM, two behind and across the same city, records 51.68. Graduation outcomes run the other way: its 81.26 beats the 76.01 of NIPER Kolkata at rank 29 and the 70.21 of NIPER Hajipur at rank 30, both of them placed above it. This is a college that gets its students through and into work, and does not publish or attract research on the scale of the institutions immediately around it.

Open the Academic Departments list on the college's page and it holds one entry, the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences. There is no departmental fork to choose on arrival. Specialisation is a single decision taken on the M.Pharm application, across the eight subject areas the college names.

Doctoral work is organised differently again, and more narrowly than the master's grid suggests. The Directorate of Admissions lists three departments for research admission in this college, pharmaceutical technology, pharmaceutical biotechnology, and pharmacognosy and phytochemistry, while its eligibility annexure keeps six pharmaceutical test subjects on the books, adding pharmaceutical chemistry, pharmaceutical analysis and quality assurance, and a combined pharmacology, pharmacy practice and Pharm.D subject. If you intend to stay for a doctorate, check which of the six actually opened a seat in the year you apply.

The two facilities the college puts forward first have names rather than numbers. It describes ELEMENT, a laboratory built for hands-on training, start-up ideas, manufacturing, quality control and biological monitoring, with a toxicology hub called EYRIES inside it. Around them sit 18 teaching and research laboratories, an industrial pharmacy unit, a computer laboratory, two seminar halls and an auditorium, and a library of 10,000 text and reference books with 50 pharmaceutical journals, alongside access to the University Scientific Instrumentation Centre. The published instrument list runs from HPLC, GC and NMR through DSC, DTA, XRD and FTIR to lyophilisers, fermenters, bioreactors and an organic parallel synthesiser.

For a Pharm.D candidate the hospital matters more than any of that. The college holds an MOU with King George Hospital and works with its patients on every working day, with Pharm.D students trained there, and it runs patient counselling both in the AU dispensary and at the hospital. It also states that it was instrumental in starting the Andhra University Ethics Committee for Research on Human Volunteers, which is the sort of thing a clinical placement depends on existing.

Spending on all of it fell hard in 2024-25, and the drop is worth asking about on a campus visit. Capital expenditure on the library went from Rs 61,64,229 in 2023-24 to Rs 5,71,500 in 2024-25, and new laboratory equipment from Rs 5,02,16,950 to Rs 1,22,66,235. Whether that is a one-year gap in a purchase cycle or a settled level is not something the filing answers.

This is one of the few colleges in the state with a hall of residence named for its own discipline. Andhra University's hostel register lists the Smt Lalitha Devi Puranam and Sri Kotilingamurthy Puranam Pharmacy Women's Hostel among the halls it runs, and the hall's page gives its chief warden as Prof. D. Ashalatha and its size as one block, with two named staff. That matters here more than it would elsewhere, because women are the majority in every programme: the B.Pharm roll of 260 carries 160 women and the M.Pharm roll of 222 carries 144.

No capacity, room rent or mess charge is published for that hall, and the university's general hostel note says only that places are available for a limited number of students and that applications go to the Chief Warden of the Hostels. So the residence cost cannot be stated honestly here, and the warden's office above is the address that can price it.

The teaching roll is smaller than it was and mostly not permanent. The college entered 43 faculty members in its NIRF 2025 return; the following year's filing names them individually, and there are 35 of them, of whom 11 are recorded as regular appointments and 24 as ad hoc or contractual. The permanent core is five professors, three associate professors, two assistant professors and the principal. Everyone else teaching here holds a contract, and five of them carry the professor designation on it.

Depth on the regular side is real and old. Prof. J. Vijaya Ratna joined on 24 April 1980 and Prof. K.V. Ramana Murthy on 7 November 1985, and five more of the regular staff have been in post since 2006, the year the department became a college. Against that, most of the contractual appointments date from 2021 onwards, several of them holding a Pharm.D or a Master of Pharmacy rather than a doctorate.

Research capacity and research money are moving in opposite directions. The doctoral register carries 24 full-time and 43 part-time scholars up to 2024-25, a part-time majority that fits a faculty supervising working pharmacists, and the college has filed 4 patents published and 3 granted in 2024 against 7 published and 2 granted in 2023. Sponsored research, though, collapsed: 17 projects from 7 funding agencies worth Rs 2,75,00,000 in 2023-24 became 3 projects from 3 agencies worth Rs 7,58,753 in 2024-25, and consultancy income fell from Rs 1,01,20,000 to Rs 7,50,000 over the same year. That is the funding side of the flat research score above.

The college's own account of its research reaches further back and is stated without a date. It records that the founder faculty member Prof. E. Venkata Rao's work produced the cardiac drug Peruvoside, still manufactured by the Italian firm Indena, and counts 88 doctorates awarded and 1010 research papers published by the faculty, with thirty-one major projects completed and 11 more worth Rs 1.88 crore ongoing at the time the page was written.

The college names no individual graduate. Its page states only that its alumni hold high positions in national and international bodies, the drug industry, drugs control administration and universities in India and abroad, and that they have formed the Andhra University Pharmacy Alumni Association under the umbrella of the university's alumni association. No roll, no batch list and no directory is published, so any name attached to this college on a listing site is somebody else's attribution and not the institution's.

What it does publish is its teaching lineage, which is unusually complete. The page names every head of department from Prof. S. Rangaswamy from 1951 to 1963 through to Prof. P. Ellaiah from 1999 to 2001, a run of ten names covering half a century. For a research applicant tracing a school of work in pharmacognosy or pharmaceutical chemistry, that list is more useful than a roll of employers would be.

Nothing this college posts changes an admission date. The two APSCHE entrance calendars do, and each is dated months in advance. AP EAPCET 2026 was notified on 4 February 2026, with the agriculture and pharmacy papers sat on 19 and 20 May, a preliminary key on 23 May, objections closing on 25 May at Rs 300 per question, and results tentatively on 1 June. Applications are still accepted after the 24 March cutoff, through four successive extension windows priced at Rs 1,000, then Rs 2,000, then Rs 4,000, then Rs 10,000.

The postgraduate calendar runs a month earlier and is set inside this university. AP PGECET 2026 opened applications on 6 February, closed without late fee on 20 March, released hall tickets on 15 April, sat its papers on 28, 29 and 30 April, and published results on 14 May. The college's own department page carries no news feed at all, and its events and gallery panels both report that they are being updated, so the state portals are where an applicant should be watching.

Andhra Pradesh puts five institutions on the NIRF 2025 pharmacy table and this college leads them, ahead of the Gandhi Institute of Technology and Management in the same city and of Sri Padmavathi Mahila Visvavidyalayam at Tirupati, Acharya Nagarjuna University's pharmacy college at Guntur and Sri Venkateswara College of Pharmacy at Chittoor. The band it actually sits in is national.

The comparison worth making is the one inside Visakhapatnam, because the two colleges are two places apart on opposite scorecards. This college scores 79.77 on teaching against GITAM's 70.49, and 22.49 on research against GITAM's 51.68. Only one of the two is filled through Andhra Pradesh's own counselling, at the Rs 29,900 college fee the council's sheet prints and only for candidates who satisfy the state's local status rules. A student who wants a low-cost state seat and a strong teaching and outcomes profile is choosing this one; a student who needs an active research supervisor should read both parameter rows before choosing either.

The Principal's office is the only address that can answer a fee question here, and it is a different desk from the university's general enquiry line.

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