Poona College Of Pharmacy, Pune

A first-year B.Pharm class at Poona College of Pharmacy is filled twice over, from two queues that never see each other's paperwork. Sixty of the 100 seats sit in a grant-in-aid division and are allotted by the Maharashtra CET Cell on an MHT-CET percentile; the other 40 are self-financed and go to whoever ranks high enough on Bharati Vidyapeeth's own entrance paper, at Rs 1,65,375 a year. Which queue you join decides your exam, your fee and the desk you report to at counselling, and no listing page for this college states both. The college finished 34th on the government's 2025 pharmacy ranking, the highest placing of any pharmacy institution in Pune.

Poona College of Pharmacy is a constituent unit of Bharati Vidyapeeth (Deemed to be University), on the More Vidyalaya campus at Erandwane rather than the university's main campus at Dhankawadi. Dr Patangrao Kadam founded it in 1981, and its degrees arrived in a long sequence after that: B.Pharm in 1981, M.Pharm in 1986, the doctorate in 1990, and both Pharm.D and Pharm.D (Post Baccalaureate) in 2009.

The status underneath that is the fact most listing pages miss, and it is what makes the college behave like two institutions at once. Its own page records it as a Grant-in-Aid institute of the Govt. of Maharashtra, recognised under sections 2(f) and 12(B) of the UGC Act, and the Maharashtra CET Cell's counselling sheet independently prints its status as Government-Aided. A deemed university's constituent college that is also on the state's aid roll is an uncommon arrangement, and every fee and admission question below turns on it.

The homepage contradicts itself about the founding date inside a single screen. One paragraph on it says "Established in 2009" while introducing the M.Pharm specialisations, and a line further down the same page says the college was established in 1981; the overview page settles it by dating the Pharm.D and Pharm.D (PB), not the college, to 2009. Read the earlier line alone and you will halve the age of a college that has been teaching pharmacy for more than four decades.

National standing has moved by one place in a year. The college stands 34th on 56.28 in the 2025 pharmacy table, and its own accreditation page still shows the rank of 35 it held in the 2024 edition.

Five programmes run here, and the price of the same degree depends on which division of the college your allotment lands in.

Read the quota column before the amount, because the same seat carries three prices. The undergraduate brochure prices a self-financed B.Pharm seat at Rs 1,65,375 a year on regular merit, Rs 2,67,470 under the institutional quota and US $6,685 in the foreign and non-resident category, and a Pharm.D seat at Rs 2,13,005, Rs 3,10,000 and US $9,705 respectively. It also states that tuition is revised upwards by 5 per cent every year, so a four-year bill is more than four times the first-year figure and a six-year Pharm.D bill considerably more than six.

The master's programme is priced in two bands rather than one. Pharmaceutics, Pharmacology, Quality Assurance Techniques and Drug Regulatory Affairs cost Rs 2,31,525 a year on regular merit, while Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Pharmacognosy, Pharmaceutical Biotechnology and Industrial Pharmacy cost Rs 2,13,005, each carrying a further Rs 15,000 contingency charge. Under the institutional quota the two bands become Rs 3,34,610 and Rs 3,10,000, with the contingency unchanged.

What no published document gives is the fee for the aided seats. The brochure prices the self-financed division and says so in the heading of its own table, and the 60 grant-in-aid places carry no rupee figure anywhere the university publishes. That amount has to come from the college office. Two smaller items are stated: a refundable library deposit is payable at admission and returned when the course ends, and the brochure warns in capitals that no donation or capitation fee is required for admission.

There are two front doors and they open in different months, on different exams, run by different authorities.

The aided door is the state's. Maharashtra's CET Cell carries the college as institute code 06652 with choice code 0665282310 for B.Pharmacy, its status recorded as Government-Aided and its home university zone as Savitribai Phule Pune University, which places these seats inside the state's centralised admission process on an MHT-CET percentile. Pharm.D does not appear against the college in that list at all, so the six-year degree has no state counselling route here.

The self-financed door is the university's own paper. BV-PHARMUG-2026 is a 200-mark test of 180 minutes with 60 marks of Physics, 60 of Chemistry and 80 of either Mathematics or Biology, the choice made when the form is filled, no negative marking, and questions set on the Maharashtra state board's Class 11 and Class 12 science syllabus. A tie is broken first on the Chemistry score, then on the Class 12 total, then by computerised random selection. The test fee is Rs 1,700 and it is not refunded to an absentee.

Two eligibility clauses catch applicants out. A 10+2 taken through the National Institute of Open Schooling or a state open school system does not qualify a candidate for either B.Pharm or Pharm.D here, a bar written into the brochure for both programmes. A Diploma in Pharmacy from a PCI-approved institution, by contrast, is an accepted qualification for Pharm.D and not for B.Pharm.

Reserved-category seats are carved out of the self-financed 40 and 30 rather than added on top of them. Fifteen per cent of the 40 B.Pharm and 30 Pharm.D seats are reserved for foreign, NRI, PIO, OCI and institutional-quota candidates, who apply separately at the Registrar's office on a Rs 1,000 form with 5 June 2026 as the last date, and whatever they leave unfilled returns to Indian candidates on entrance-test merit.

Postgraduate entry runs on a second paper, BV-PHARMPG-2026, at a test fee of Rs 2,000, with one combined merit list covering both M.Pharm and Pharm.D (PB), and eligibility set at 55 per cent in the B.Pharm, or 50 per cent for SC, ST and sponsored candidates. GPAT is not a gate. Candidates without a GPAT score sit the same paper and compete for the same list; what the score decides is which block of seats you are placed against, whether you break a tie in your favour, and whether the AICTE fellowship follows you in.

Counselling is done in person and in strict merit order. The college's postgraduate counselling notice for the 2024-25 cycle, the most recent one it has published, called candidates to the More Vidyalaya campus on Poud Road in timed slots, taking Pharm.D (PB) preferences first, then SC and ST candidates, then GPAT-qualified candidates in bands of merit numbers 1 to 150, 151 to 300 and 301 onwards, then non-GPAT candidates to merit number 400 and beyond. Seat allotment, full payment of the year's fee and submission of original certificates all happen in that one sitting.

The two routes give two different answers to the cutoff question, and only one of them produces a published number.

For the aided seats, the state prints the closing figure for every category after each round. These are the third-round closings for B.Pharmacy at the college in 2025-26, given as a state general merit number with the MHT-CET percentile behind it.

Read the CAP Round III sheet for two things its sharpest percentile does not show. There is no open home-university row in it, because that seat had already gone in an earlier round, which is why the sharpest surviving figure is the ladies open seat at merit number 200. The reserved rows are also nowhere near each other inside the same aided division: the Scheduled Tribe seat closed on 81.5685735 in that round and the OBC seat on 97.8603447, a spread of more than sixteen percentile points between two seats in one B.Pharm classroom.

By the final round the pressure eased in some categories and not others. In CAP Round IV the OBC home-university seat closed at merit number 735 on 97.8241989 and the open other-than-home seat at 615 on 98.0960303, while the tuition fee waiver seat slipped to 1931 on 95.3901197.

The self-financed seats have no cutoff at all, in any year. The brochure describes BV-PHARMUG as a ranking examination and states that appearing in it and reaching the merit list confers no automatic right to admission; the seat is offered at counselling by rank and by what is still vacant. What closes the queue is therefore the rank at which the seats run out on the day, and it exists only in hindsight. The same is true of the M.Pharm specialisations, where the merit bands in the counselling notice are the closest thing to a threshold anyone publishes.

The dependable placement numbers here are the ones filed with the Ministry of Education, because the college's own placement records page carries no figures whatsoever.

The postgraduate end is where employment holds. 92 of the 104 M.Pharm students who finished on time took a job, against 68 of 110 in B.Pharm, where a further 35 left for further study. A bachelor's degree here buys a master's seat about as often as it buys a first salary, and the six-year Pharm.D, small as it is, pays the highest median of the three.

Medians have moved up across the three years the filing covers, though not in a straight line. The B.Pharm median went from Rs 3,00,000 to Rs 3,60,000 to Rs 4,00,000, the Pharm.D median from Rs 4,50,000 to Rs 4,60,000 to Rs 5,00,000, and the M.Pharm median dipped from Rs 4,20,000 to Rs 4,10,000 before reaching Rs 4,50,000.

The placement cell's summary of itself and the college's ranking return describe two different B.Pharm batches. The cell writes that more than 80 percent of students have an offer letter in hand at the time they complete the course, while the same year's return records 68 of 110 B.Pharm finishers placed. At the master's end the claim roughly holds; at the bachelor's end it does not. Where the aggregators get a highest package for Poona College of Pharmacy is not the college: neither the placement records page nor the cell's page names a recruiter or a top salary.

Sanctioned intake is declared to the ranking framework by programme group, and the college has held the same numbers for two years.

That undergraduate 100 is the number that splits. The brochure states the annual intake of first-year B.Pharm as 100 seats, of which 60 are in the grant-in-aid division and 40 in the self-financed division, and that everyone admitted through BV-PHARMUG takes one of the 40, alongside 30 Pharm.D seats.

The master's intake is published in a finer grid, subject by subject and category by category, which is unusual enough to be worth reading before you pick a specialisation.

Added up, 58 of the seats sit in the GPAT block, 22 are set aside for SC and ST candidates and 30 are open to non-GPAT and sponsored candidates. Pharmacognosy and Pharmaceutical Biotechnology are the two thin ones at ten seats each, so a candidate set on either is competing in a much smaller pool than the grid's total suggests.

One programme is missing from the ranking filing entirely. The three-year Pharm.D (Post Baccalaureate), with an intake capacity of 10 seats, has no row in the three programme groups the college declares to NIRF, so its students are not inside the intake, strength or placement tables above.

Two of those five are doing the work and two are holding the college back. Graduation outcomes at 74.09 and teaching at 73.07 carry the 56.28 overall, while research and professional practice sits at 35.55 and perception at 29.85. A college with a low perception score and a solid outcomes score is one whose graduates do better than its reputation suggests, which is a useful asymmetry for an applicant and a poor one for the marketing department.

The weakest of those five parameters reads differently once you see where the college's research money comes from, because testing work out-earns grant work here. Consultancy brought Rs 90,01,833 across 206 projects for 96 client organisations in 2023-24; sponsored research brought Rs 77,66,530 across 32 projects from 5 funding agencies. That many separate paid jobs in a year is a service laboratory running at volume, and the instruments it pays for are the instruments a project student ends up booking time on.

The navigation bar, not a prospectus, is where this college keeps its department list. The classical divisions are all on it: Pharmaceutics, Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Pharmacology and Pharmacognosy. Alongside them sit the ones a regulated industry added later, Quality Assurance Techniques, Drug Regulatory Affairs, Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, Industrial Pharmacy and Pharmacy Practice. Line that up against the M.Pharm seat grid and one department has no master's of its own: Pharmacy Practice, which is the Pharm.D department. A master's applicant therefore chooses from eight of the departments, not from all of them.

There is no departmental fork at undergraduate entry. A B.Pharm student takes the common curriculum and the specialisation decision arrives only at the postgraduate application, where it is made once and for the whole two years.

The library is the facility the college documents in most detail. It holds 26,123 books, 22 print journals, more than 2393 e-journals and more than 195809 e-books across 5 online databases, in 211.75 square metres with a reading hall seating 66, open from 8 in the morning to 8 in the evening. Cataloguing runs on INFLIBNET's SOUL 3.0 with barcoded stock, subscriptions include N-LIST, Micromedex, e-ShodhSindhu and Shodhganga, and a book bank operates for Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and economically backward students. Its digital repository, GyanBharati, holds 156 theses and 1422 research papers in digitised form.

Laboratory provision is split so that postgraduates are not sharing benches with first-years. The college runs separate undergraduate and postgraduate laboratories for its main subject areas and keeps its heavy instruments in dedicated analytical rooms, listing UPLC, gas and high-performance liquid chromatography, high-performance thin-layer chromatography, atomic absorption spectrometry, FTIR, differential scanning calorimetry, PCR and a spectrofluorimeter among them, with plant tissue culture in pharmacognosy and dissolution, particle-size and rheology equipment in pharmaceutics.

What distinguishes this campus from a teaching-only one is the set of licensed facilities annexed to it. The college lists a Public Testing Laboratory approved by the Food and Drug Administration of Maharashtra for allopathic, ayurvedic and herbal formulations, a Schedule M pilot plant manufacturing facility, a food testing laboratory certified by NABL and APEDA, a Drug and Poison Information Centre, an Industry Institute Partnership Cell and an Entrepreneur Development Cell, with the SKiiLD incubation centre alongside them. Those licences are what the consultancy volume above is actually made of.

Spending backs the equipment list. In 2023-24 the college reported capital spending of Rs 32,47,579 on the library and Rs 1,12,96,779 on new laboratory equipment, and it states that lifts or ramps reach more than 80% of its buildings.

Residence here is limited and it is not guaranteed with the seat. The brochure says a small number of hostel places are available on campus, in separate halls for men and women that carry different fees, allotted first come first served, with the full year's rent and the whole year's mess charges payable at the time of admission by a separate demand draft.

The amounts are not published. The brochure states twice that hostel fee details will be given in the counselling letter, and no rent, capacity or mess rate appears on the college or university pages, so the residence cost cannot be stated honestly on this page. Ask for it before counselling day rather than on it, because it is due in full that morning.

The teaching roll is large and, unusually for a private-sector pharmacy college, entirely permanent. The college named 65 teachers in its NIRF 2025 return, 61 of them still in post at the time of filing and 4 recorded as having left, and every single appointment is entered as Regular rather than ad hoc or contractual.

The shape of that roll is bottom-heavy, doctorate-rich and majority women. Assistant professors outnumber everyone else on it: 45 of them against 12 professors and 8 associate professors, with 42 doctorates on the roll and 34 women among the 65. Depth at the senior end is real and old: two professors have been in post since 1992 and 1995 respectively, and several more joined in the 2000s.

Research supervision capacity is the number a prospective M.Pharm or Ph.D applicant should weigh. The doctoral register carries 83 full-time and 22 part-time scholars, 5 doctorates were awarded in 2023-24, and the college filed 13 patents published and 8 granted in the 2023 calendar year. A full-time majority in the doctoral pool means supervisors here are mostly working with residential scholars rather than part-time industry candidates.

Bharati Vidyapeeth publishes a testimonial panel for this college and nothing that works as a register: no graduating batch list, no year-wise roll and no searchable directory, so a name attached to Poona College of Pharmacy on an aggregator is that site's attribution and not the college's. The panel splits into an alumni tab and a student tab, and the only person on the alumni side identified by an employer is Sanjeev Pendharkar, given as Director of Vicco Laboratories.

The checkable pattern is on the student tab rather than the alumni one, and it points inwards. Akshay Khandke and Likhit Akotkar are quoted there as students; both now appear as assistant professors in the college's NIRF faculty return, and Khandke is also listed as secretary of the training and placement cell committee whose work he was thanking. A department that hires its own recent master's students says more to a research applicant than a list of corporate designations would.

The dates that actually move an application are entrance test dates, and the 2026 undergraduate cycle was rescheduled once. The ticker on the college's page carries the university's notice that the B.Pharm and Pharm.D entrance test was moved to 27 June 2026 with 21 June as the last date to apply, because NEET had been fixed for 21 June, and that its result was due on 6 July 2026. That notice names the paper BV-BPharm while the brochure for the same test calls it BV-PHARMUG-2026, so search on the programme rather than the code.

An applicant tracking this college should not be refreshing its Happenings panel. What sits there is campus events dated across 2023 and 2024, from a blood donation camp to National Pharmacy Week, while the self-financed dates move on the university's central CET pages and the aided-division dates move on the state CET Cell's portal. Two calendars run this college's admissions and neither of them is the one on its news panel.

Maharashtra puts several pharmacy institutions on the national table, and this college sits in the middle of them rather than at the top.

The comparison that decides something is the Pune one, and the two colleges are a tenth of a point apart on the total while being opposites underneath it. Against Dr D Y Patil Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences and Research, this college scores 35.55 on research against 25.51, and 29.85 on perception against 64.76. One of the two is better known than its research record; the other is the reverse. An applicant who wants a supervisor and a laboratory should read those two rows before reading the ranks.

The route in separates them further than any score does. Only one of the two carries aided seats filled through the state's counselling on an MHT-CET percentile; a candidate whose percentile is strong and whose budget is not has a reason to prefer this college that has nothing to do with either institution's rank.

Use the right desk or you will be sent back. The entrance test line answers everything about BV-PHARMUG and BV-PHARMPG, from forms to admit cards to results. Anything about the aided division, the fee attached to it, a hostel place or a document at counselling belongs to the college office on the general enquiry number. Postgraduate counselling itself is held on the More Vidyalaya campus, which is the same address as the college.

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