KLE Vishwanath Katti Institute Of Dental Sciences

A first-year BDS student at KLE Vishwanath Katti Institute of Dental Sciences in Belagavi was billed Rs 3,12,500 in 2024-25. For 2026-27, the university's sheet asks Rs 5,10,000. The college sits 29th in the NIRF 2025 dental table, and every one of its BDS and MDS places is allotted by the Medical Counselling Committee in Delhi, with none held back for Karnataka's own counselling. KLE also runs a separately ranked dental college in Bengaluru, and its figures do not apply here.

The dental college opened in August 1985 with 40 students, grew to 100 BDS places by 1992-93 and began postgraduate teaching in every speciality, according to its Vision 2030 document. KAHER's page for the institute names the late Dr S.S. Khera as first principal and places the college inside the Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College grounds at Nehru Nagar. The undergraduate dentistry page dates the Dental Council of India's approval of the BDS to 1989 and the start of postgraduate courses to 1990. The college has carried two earlier names, KLE Society's Dental College and Hospital and KLE Institute of Dental Sciences, both listed under the masthead on its homepage.

Who signs the degree has changed twice, and the college's alumni page records it batch by batch: graduates listed under KUD for 1992 to 1996, Rajiv Gandhi University of Health Sciences for 1996 to 2005, and KAHER from 2006. Today the fee sheet, the reporting venue and the degree are all KAHER's, and the registrar's letter approving the 2025-26 BDS admissions describes the college as a "constituent unit of KAHER". Some of the college's own pages, the homepage included, still use the phrase "affiliated to KLE Academy of Higher Education and Research".

Rule out the Bengaluru namesake before trusting any KLE dental figure. K L E Society's Institute of Dental Sciences in Bengaluru is a different college with its own NIRF entry, 40th in the 2025 dental table, and it is counselled by the Karnataka Examinations Authority under code D119 in KEA's 2026 BDS seat matrix. The Belagavi institute appears nowhere in that KEA matrix.

At the top, the June 2026 teaching staff list names Dr Kanteshwari I. K. as principal and Dr V.R. Kumbhojkar as Dean of the Faculty of Dentistry; the latter is the name the college entered under the dean and principal heading of its NIRF return.

Besides the BDS, which is four years of teaching at 240 days a year followed by a one-year rotatory internship per the BDS page, the college teaches the three-year MDS in nine specialities and a PhD that the Vision 2030 document dates to 2007. Its menu also carries diplomas for dental hygienists and dental mechanics, and Dant Pari, a six-month dental auxiliary course inaugurated on 1st February 2023, per its Dant Pari page.

BDS Fee

KAHER prices the BDS year by year and has raised the Indian-student rate in each of the last two cycles. The three notifications below are the university's own.

KAHER's sheets list four fee years and stop there, so the rotatory internship year carries no tuition line. The NRI scale has stayed put through all three sheets at $12,500 for the first year and $11,000 for each later one, payable in dollars only, per the 2026-27 instructions. A family that budgeted on the Rs 3,12,500 first year printed in the 2024-25 notice now faces Rs 5,10,000 for the same seat in the 2026-27 instructions.

MDS Fee

What an MDS costs here depends almost entirely on the subject. KAHER's MDS reporting procedure for 2026-27 sets one rate for six clinical specialities and much lower ones for three others.

In the 2024-25 sheet the first-year clinical rate was Rs 10,04,000, oral medicine and oral pathology cost Rs 50,000, and public health dentistry Rs 1,00,000, per the 2024-25 MDS fee sheet. The NRI figure moved the other way: that sheet charged $34,300 for a first year, against $21,300 in the 2026-27 procedure. Every MDS student, whatever the subject, is paid a stipend of Rs 3,000 a month under both sheets.

Rs 80,000 a year for oral pathology or oral medicine in the MDS procedure is less than a sixth of the Rs 5,05,000 a second-year BDS student pays under the BDS instructions.

MCC allots every seat, and no other route exists. KAHER's undergraduate dentistry page sends BDS applicants to the MCC, and its postgraduate dentistry page does the same for NEET-MDS candidates. The seat table in KAHER's 2026-27 reporting instructions makes the contrast inside the university explicit: JNMC Belagavi and the Hubballi medical college each carry a column of KEA seats for Karnataka candidates, while the dental college's KEA column is a dash, with all 100 places split 97 general and 3 NRI under MCC.

Karnataka's own records agree. The dental college has no row in KEA's 2026 BDS seat matrix, where the only Belgaum entry is Maratha Mandal Dental College, or in KEA's 2026 MDS matrix. A Karnataka student who registers only with KEA will never be offered a seat here, and a Karnataka domicile or caste certificate earns no reserved seat either: the MCC's round-one matrix enters both BDS lines under the open category.

BDS Eligibility

Karnataka's two-year PU examination, or an equivalent board, is the qualifying test named on the college's BDS page, and the bar there is a combined 50% across the three science subjects plus a pass in English, lowered by 10% for SC and ST applicants. On age, the university and the college disagree. The college page lets a candidate turn 17 as late as 31st December of the admission year, while KAHER's undergraduate dentistry page requires 17 on or before the first day of December; a candidate born in December should plan on the stricter university date.

Allotted candidates report to KAHER's own admission venue on the JNMC campus, which handles the dental college's intake alongside the two medical colleges. One document in the checklist deserves reading before signing: Annexure-A of the reporting instructions, a notarised undertaking on stamp paper in which the student and a parent agree to abide by university norms on fee payment if the course is discontinued for any reason. NRI dental fees go to a separate Canara Bank account held in the dental institute's name, not the one used for the medical colleges.

MDS Eligibility

KAHER's postgraduate dentistry page admits only BDS graduates of Dental Council of India recognised colleges who have finished the compulsory rotating internship and hold permanent registration, and it names NEET-MDS, conducted by the National Board of Examinations, as the entrance for the course. On top of the school papers a BDS entrant carries, KAHER's MDS checklist wants university mark cards for all phases of the BDS, the degree or provisional certificate, and proof the internship is complete.

The 2026 ranks for this college are printed allottee by allottee in MCC's result PDFs, listed under the short name KLE VK Inst. of Dental Scie. Belagavi.

BDS Allotment in 2026

Run a text search on MCC's round-one NEET-UG result for that short name and every Belagavi BDS row comes up, with the NEET-UG rank in the second column and the words Self-Financed Merit Seat or Non-Resident Indian beside it, so the two queues can be read separately. The round-two result, stamped 12-09-2026, marks round-one names here with statuses such as Retained, Upgraded or Not Reported, and lists the Fresh Allotted candidates who took the freed seats. Seats keep changing hands after that file too, so a rank that missed Belagavi in the first list is not yet a settled answer.

MDS Ranks in 2026

MCC's first MDS round has been published and its second has not, per the MCC MDS counselling page. The first and last paid-seat allottee in each subject of the round-one result are set out below next to what that subject costs a year.

Price is not what sorted these candidates. Public health dentistry, at a tenth of the clinical fee in the MDS procedure, drew ranks between 3,111 and 3,703 in the result, while periodontology at Rs 12,90,000 took ranks from 10,072. Oral medicine, priced at Rs 80,000 in the same procedure, opened at rank 1,851, ahead of oral surgery. The NRI side was thin: one of the six NRI MDS seats was allotted in round one, in orthodontics at rank 14,422, and one paid oral pathology seat was left empty, per the same result.

The college keeps its 2026 NIRF return on its own server, and pairing it with the nirfindia.org sheet for 2025 gives outcomes for the classes that left between 2021-22 and 2024-25.

Start with the entry column. The 2026 return shows first-year BDS entry of 91 in 2019-20 and 77 in 2020-21, short of the 100 sanctioned both years. The 2021-22 line in the 2025 data sheet records nobody placed and 42 of 81 graduates in further study, which makes the median climb since then a recovery from zero rather than a steady trend. A 2024-25 graduate's Rs 4,00,000 median, per the 2026 return, falls short of the Rs 5,05,000 that KAHER's 2026-27 instructions charge a 2026 entrant in every year after the first.

Residents have fared better year on year, with the MDS median reaching Rs 8,00,000 for 2024-25, though only 35 of the 40 residents admitted in 2022-23 finished on time that year, per the 2026 return. That single MDS median covers every subject, from oral pathology at Rs 80,000 a year to the six clinical subjects at Rs 12,90,000 in the MDS procedure, so it cannot tell a resident what their own speciality earns.

MCC carries this college under code 200341 in its round-one NEET-UG matrix, with 97 self-financed merit seats and 3 NRI seats, none of them set aside by category. For MDS, code 900136 in the final deemed MDS matrix spreads the 40 seats on the college's MDS page across nine specialities.

The total of 40 on the MDS page has held, but the split has moved. KAHER's 2024-25 MDS sheet gave conservative dentistry 4 paid seats and 1 NRI seat, and oral surgery 4 paid and 2 NRI, the reverse of today's weighting in both subjects.

Karnataka students are a minority in both classrooms. Of 413 on the BDS roll in the 2026 NIRF return, 114 are from the state and 299 from elsewhere in India, and just 9 of the 116 MDS residents come from Karnataka. Women make up 318 of the 413 on the BDS roll.

The college has placed in five of the last six NIRF dental tables, reaching its highest score of those years in 2025 at 55.42, the same 29th place it held a year earlier.

A KLE name does appear in the 2022 table, at 28th, but its city column reads Bengaluru, so it is the other KLE dental college and not a 2022 rank for Belagavi. Every Belagavi entry carries the NIRF ID IR-N-C-24504, the same code on the college's data submissions.

From 2024 to 2025 graduation outcomes climbed by about fifteen points and perception slid by about seven, leaving the rank unchanged.

Outreach and inclusivity has barely moved across the tables. Research is the drag, below 20 in every table the college appears in since 2020, when it stood at 17.89.

The homepage menu lists nine clinical departments, pairing each formal title, such as Paediatric and Preventive Dentistry, with the shorter name it is also known by, such as Pedodontics, and adds a tenth for Dental Education. The Vision 2030 document traces that last one to a continuing-education cell set up in 1996 that now runs an annual scientific convention for interns and postgraduates.

Two cross-department units are worth asking about during a visit. The Centre for Dentofacial Deformity joins orthodontics with oral and maxillofacial surgery for jaw corrections, including maxillary and mandibular osteotomy and genioplasty. And the departments file patents: the college's patents page lists herbal gels, irrigating solutions and dental devices filed under the names of its dentists, with a turmeric gel for use alongside scaling and root planing marked as a final grant, Grant No 330591.

Library figures depend on which document you read. The college's library information booklet describes a dental library in the three-storied Dr S.G. Desai Library over 30,526.58 sq ft, with 8,756 books, 63 journals and 295 e-journals, seating for 666 and a second-floor reading room open 24x7. KAHER's library page calls the Dr S.G. Desai Library the university's central library and gives it 43,440 sq ft, so ask on a visit which rooms and shelves the dental booklet is counting. The reference section keeps 9.00 am to 10.00 pm on working days, and the booklet's rules bar women students from entering after 9:00 PM, a restriction worth knowing before relying on the round-the-clock reading room for exam study.

Outpatient figures come from the NIRF filings and do not line up neatly by year: the 2026 return enters 1,110 against calendar 2022, while the older 2025 sheet enters 923 against calendar 2023. Treatment is priced low for patients: the college's treatment charge list makes OPD registration free, prices a single-tooth implant at Rs 10,000 to Rs 15,000 and aligners at Rs 1,05,000, and states that robotic surgery and AI-assisted treatment are not offered.

Rural postings run through satellite centres. The satellite centre page lists Gokak, Hindalga, Bailhongal, Chikodi, Samadev Galli, Nippani, Yellur and Shahapur, and the Vision 2030 document places one of them in Hindalga Central Jail.

Money moved away from laboratory kit in the latest year. Equipment purchases fell to Rs 1,00,63,605 in 2024-25 from Rs 1,40,59,184, while the catch-all line for other capital assets jumped to Rs 2,37,52,226, per the 2026 return.

Rooms are handled by KLES Hostels and Residential Quarters on the JNMC campus, separately from the college. KAHER's current dental hostel sheet puts undergraduate women in Neelambika hostel in three-sharing rooms without attached bathrooms, undergraduate men in Sangam hostel two to a room, postgraduate women in single attached rooms at Gangambika, and postgraduate men in two-sharing attached rooms at Sangam. Meals are no longer in the rent on that sheet and are paid to the mess vendor, and because the notice is a scanned image, its rupee amounts are best read off the document itself.

The previous year's sheet is machine-readable and shows the older all-inclusive arrangement. The June 2025 UG dental hostel notice charged a yearly Rs 83,000 in Neelambika and Rs 86,000 in Sangam with breakfast, lunch, evening snacks and dinner included, and listed separate attached two-sharing hostels for NRI BDS students at Rs 1,25,000.

Readers and lecturers together outnumber professors on this campus, 29 of each against 31 professors plus the dean, across the 90 names in the 2026 NIRF return, where 52 are women and none is on contract. The 2025 data sheet entered 88.

In the 2026 return, Dr Alka Kale, a professor who joined on 01-10-1988 with 442 months of experience, is the earliest entry, and a doctorate sits beside the MDS for only 7 names on the list. Hiring picked up recently, with 7 of the joining dates falling in 2024, six of them in October.

Doctoral and funded research has grown. Part-time doctoral scholars went from 16 to 26 between the 2025 sheet and the 2026 return, and full-time ones from 1 to 4. Grant money has outpaced project numbers: the 2026 return books Rs 1,19,61,714 against 13 projects from 7 agencies in 2024-25, where the 2025 sheet shows Rs 25,59,545 across 19 projects in 2021-22.

The college publishes batch-wise lists of its BDS and MDS graduates on its alumni page. The only career details it prints come from its own alumni testimonials, chosen by the college: Dr Sameer Patil of the 1994 batch writes as principal and head of orthodontics at Sinhgad Dental College and Hospital, Pune, and Prof. P G Naveen Kumar as a teacher of public health dentistry at Banaras Hindu University. Both roles are as the college printed them in that file, so treat them as its account, not a verified current listing.

The admission notices that matter for 2026 sit on KAHER's site, not the college's. KAHER posted its MDS reporting procedure in September 2026, after MCC's first MDS round, and its BDS reporting instructions name 8th September 2026 as the start of the undergraduate session.

Among Karnataka's entries in the NIRF 2025 dental table, only Yenepoya, Government Dental College Bangalore and KLE's own Bengaluru college rank below Belagavi's 29th.

For a north Karnataka student, SDM Dharwad is the nearest ranked alternative, and the admission routes differ more than the ranks. A Karnataka candidate who lands SDM's government quota pays Rs 95,308 a year, and even its private quota costs Rs 5,51,950, both fixed by the state in KEA's 2026-27 dental fee sheet. Belagavi offers no government-quota seat at all, so a Karnataka rank good enough for SDM's cheapest seat has nothing equivalent to claim here.

The college shares the JNMC campus at Nehru Nagar with KAHER's offices, which handle admission and fees.

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