Ramanujan College

Ramanujan College scores 14.70 on perception in the Ministry of Education's NIRF 2025 college ranking, the weakest of its five parameters by a wide margin, and it still finishes 37th in India. The name explains most of that. The college opened in 1958 as Deshbandhu College (Evening), took its present name only in 2010 and was recognised as a full-fledged day college in 2012, so its reputation is a good deal younger than the campus it sits on. What carries the rank instead are the parameters that get measured rather than surveyed: graduation outcomes at 81.74, and outreach and inclusivity at 71.93.

The college stands on CR Park Main Road at Block H in Kalkaji, in south Delhi. Its own history records that the Ministry of Rehabilitation set it up in 1958 as Deshbandhu College (Evening) for boys, in memory of Lala Deshbandhu Gupta; that the University Grants Commission has funded it in full since 1972, with the University of Delhi maintaining it; that women were admitted from 1994; and that the renaming to Ramanujan College came in 2010, with recognition as a full-fledged day college following in 2012. The name honours the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, and the college keeps its Foundation Day in December on his birth anniversary, as its prospectus sets out.

Two misreadings follow that lineage around. The first is status: public money runs this place end to end, so nothing here is privately owned or self-financed, but neither is it a central institution standing on its own feet, because every academic lever, from the curriculum framework to the seat allocation, sits with the university above it. The second is the name. Institutions in Haryana, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Andhra Pradesh also carry Ramanujan in their titles and have no connection to this one, which is the Kalkaji college maintained by the University of Delhi.

It has grown into a big undergraduate college. In the data it filed for NIRF 2026 it reported 3,335 students in its four-year undergraduate programmes and 8 in its two-year postgraduate programme, with 2,055 of the undergraduates coming from outside Delhi and 32 from outside India. That out-of-state majority shapes several things further down, not least the fact that no hostel appears anywhere in what the college publishes.

The college offers sixteen undergraduate courses across humanities, social sciences, commerce, management and vocational studies, on its own count in its Handbook of Information. The University of Delhi's allocation lists run longer than that, because the B.A. Programme appears as its separate discipline pairs rather than as a single degree.

The fee is not one figure but a stack of heads, and the college prints the list of them in its prospectus: tuition fee, university student welfare fund, college student welfare fund, university development fund, college development fund, university facilities and services charges, college facilities and services charges, economically weaker section support university fund, and the Delhi University Student Union fund. The heads marked for remittance to the university are the student welfare fund, the development fund, the facilities and services charges, the economically weaker section support fund and the student union fund; the rest stay with the college. Examination fees sit outside that total, and foreign students pay more, under the university's rules rather than the college's.

The one thing the college does not publish as readable text is the rupee total. It issues the amount for each course group as a signed notice, scanned, on its fee structure page for the session in hand, and that scan, not an estimate copied onto a listing site, is the binding figure. Read it before accepting an allocation, because the groups do not pay the same: the university heads are identical for everyone, while the college development fund and the college facilities charge climb from the B.A. group up to B.Sc. (Hons.) Computer Science and the management degree, which sit at the top of the sheet.

Nothing that decides your seat happens at Kalkaji. The college's prospectus sends every applicant to the university's Common Seat Allocation System and to the minimum eligibility conditions in its Bulletin of Information, and the university's own seat matrix is explicit that the subject mapping sitting under those conditions is a CUET one. Kalkaji picks the process up at verification and payment. Worth knowing is the shape of the help it puts behind that: a named teacher fielding queries for each subject, a separate convenor for SC, ST, OBC-NCL, EWS, PwBD and minority candidates, and a grievance convenor alongside them, all listed with a mobile number in the same document.

Two things are worth watching after the CSAS rounds finish. The first is the college's own mopping up. On 23 August 2026 it issued a notice inviting merit-based admissions to B.A. (Hons.) Hindi in physical mode, decided on Class XII marks against whatever seats remained, with registration closing on 26th August, a merit list on 27th August and fee payment by 29th August. Hindi honours carries the same intake here as English and Political Science, so a Class XII round in the last week of August is a signal about demand rather than about supply.

The second is how narrow the postgraduate side is. Its NIRF 2026 filing puts the sanctioned postgraduate intake at 4 a year, all 4 of them filled in the last year it reported admissions, with 8 students on the rolls across both years of the programme. That entry is a separate queue rather than an exemption from one: the university runs a postgraduate allocation system of its own, only a candidate who has sat CUET (PG) may apply to it, and its allocations bind every college. Sports and extra-curricular entrants come in on supernumerary seats, scored on trials and certificates rather than on the undergraduate merit list.

One college, one round, two courses: B.A. (Hons.) Applied Psychology stopped taking unreserved candidates at 822.8406 while B.A. (Hons.) Hindi stopped at 286.742. Those are minimum allocation scores, and they exist only once a CSAS round has settled, which is why nothing you can look up in advance is a target. Ramanujan College's full block of the 2026-27 first-round list is below, one row for every course it teaches, ordered by the unreserved figure.

Psychology is the thread running through the top of that table, and it produces an inversion worth planning around. B.A. (Hons.) Economics closed unreserved at 725.0169, yet the two B.A. Programme pairs that put economics next to psychology or commerce closed higher, at 790.8484 and 742.408. The expectation running the other way, that an honours degree is harder to enter than a programme pairing built on the same subject, does not hold for economics at this college, because psychology is the scarcer half of both those pairs.

Round two pulled everything down, nowhere near evenly. The second-round list puts unreserved B.Com. (Hons.) at 755.7525 and B.A. (Hons.) Applied Psychology at 808.1992, both still close to where they closed in round one; B.Sc. (Hons.) Mathematics dropped to 533.8517, B.Voc. Software Development to 545.89 and B.A. (Hons.) Hindi to 184.54. Commerce, management and the psychology-led pairs hold their level between rounds. The languages and the B.Sc. degrees other than Statistics do not, so being short of a round-one figure in a lightly preferenced course is not a reason to leave the process.

Two records exist here and they count different things. One is a campus fair the college runs and reports on itself; the other is the annual return it files with the government. Take the fair first, because it is the part with company names attached to it.

Aarambh is the placement cell's flagship job and internship event, and the Handbook of Information counts the 2024-25 edition closely: 38 companies at Aarambh 6.0 offering 77 profiles between them, 28 of those companies hiring final-year students into full-time roles and 30 opening internships, in jobs running from financial analyst and research analyst to relationship manager and business development executive. The highest package the handbook records for that edition is 11 LPA. It names Bajaj Allianz, GSC Associates, Kapable, Owlsurf Digital, Ferns N Petals, Proffus and Career Plan B among the organisations that took students, and the prospectus adds Concentrix, Genpact, Data Flow, Naukri.com, ICICI Prudential, Talocity, Tata Consultancy Services, Bajaj Finance and Ernst & Young to the longer list of past recruiters, with the principal's message putting over 170 companies in recruitment drives across the same year.

Now the return, which is duller and covers everyone. Three cohorts of its three-year degrees sit in its NIRF 2025 submission, each with the size of the graduating group beside the number who were hired out of it.

The following year sits in the NIRF 2026 filing: 372 students placed for 2024-25 on a median of Rs 5,32,000, with 468 going on to further study.

Set the higher-studies column beside the placement column across the 2025 submission and the 2026 filing and the two behave nothing alike. The number going on to postgraduate study has hardly moved across four years, sitting at 471, 462, 474 and 468, while placements climbed from 283 to 372 and the median rose from Rs 4,00,000 to Rs 5,32,000. Further study is the settled destination at this college, and recruitment is the part that has grown, off a low base.

What neither record gives you is a rate, and the gap between them is why that matters. The 2025 submission counts 367 hires out of a graduating group of 1,092; the handbook counts 38 companies at one event. The second is the number that reaches a listing site, and the college itself publishes no percentage from either. Plan on the median and the placed count, and read 11 LPA as the ceiling of a single fair rather than as a typical outcome.

The sanctioned undergraduate intake has not moved in years: 1199 for 2022-23, 2023-24 and 2024-25 alike, on its NIRF 2026 filing. Where a total that size goes is settled course by course in the University of Delhi's 2026-27 seat matrix, and because a number of courses are pegged at exactly the same size, the table below collapses them into intake bands rather than repeating identical rows.

B.Com. (Hons.) alone holds 76 unreserved places; the smallest B.A. Programme pairs hold 4. Carry that gap back to the allocation scores and the volatility explains itself, because the smallest pairings have no capacity to absorb an unusual year of preferences and the commerce degrees have a great deal. On the same sheet, the Sikh and Christian minority columns read zero straight down, which is what a non-minority college of the university looks like; the disability, armed-forces-dependant and Kashmiri-migrant columns carry small figures that are additional to the intake rather than part of it.

Sport entry is counted outside all of that. The university publishes a college-by-college sports supernumerary matrix each cycle, and the 2026-27 sheet gives Ramanujan College 24 seats for men and 16 for women.

Kho-Kho, kabaddi and weightlifting take the largest blocks, and swimming has a single seat, for a woman, which is the kind of detail worth checking against your own event before you plan a trial around it.

A total of 61.85 puts the college 37th in NIRF 2025, and that one figure conceals a range wide enough to describe two different institutions: 81.74 at one end of the five parameters behind it and 14.70 at the other.

Graduation outcomes at 81.74 is the score to hold on to, because it counts whether students finish and move on rather than what anyone thinks of the place, and it lines up with the college's own filings on further study. Perception at 14.70 is its mirror image: that parameter is a survey of employers and academics, and an institution that has carried its present name only since 2010 has had very little time to register on one. Research and professional practice at 37.04 is the weakest of the four measured parameters, and it is the one a commerce-and-humanities college with a small science wing has least room to move.

Anyone quoting this rank should know how far it travels. On the college's own timeline it stood at 33 all-India in 2017 and climbed to 26 in 2018, its best showing so far; its prospectus then puts it at 49 for 2022-23, and NIRF 2025 at 37. Moving between 26 and 49 inside a decade is a lot of movement for a college whose teaching has been broadly the same throughout, so the sensible reading is the trend and the parameter shape together, never one year's position on its own.

Outside the government table, the college records its own reading of the 2025 India Today college rankings in the same prospectus: 19 in business administration, 32 in commerce, 40 in arts and 44 in science. That is its account of a magazine survey rather than a government measure, and the ordering is the part that carries information, with the management degree placing highest and the sciences lowest.

The founding dates split the departments into two clear generations, and reading them is a quick way to understand what kind of college this became after 2010. Its prospectus puts English, History and Political Science in place from 1958, Commerce from 1964 with a B.Com. (Hons.) added in 1969, and then a rush of new departments once the college was renamed.

Alongside those, the prospectus describes a Mathematics department that has taught since the college's earliest years and has admitted to a B.Sc. (Hons.) since 2016, departments of Hindi and Punjabi, an Environmental Studies department that added instrumentation and experimentation laboratories in 2023, and a Physical Education and Sports Sciences department, which is the one behind the sports quota. The economics honours programme was introduced under the guidance of teachers from the Delhi School of Economics.

The two vocational degrees sit outside that structure. Both run under a DDU Kaushal Kendra set up with the National Skill Development Corporation, with the software development course governed by the NASSCOM sector skill council and the banking one by the BFSI council, and each year of the programme mixes general education with a skill component.

The library is fully automated on RFID integrated with the KOHA open-source system, air conditioned, under CCTV, and divided into separate reading rooms for students and for faculty, on the prospectus account of it.

What is unusual here is not the library, though, but the technical machinery around it. The Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya Research Development and Service Centre, set up in 2017, maintains the college's digital infrastructure and, in 2024-25, opened three laboratories inaugurated by the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Delhi: a 5G and next-generation connectivity lab, an AR/VR lab, and a soil testing lab built around the Pusa STRF meter, all recorded in the prospectus. The same centre's first consultancy project, automating ballot counting for a State Bank of India officers' election, earned Rs 3,00,000. The college's separate list of IT facilities in the same document runs to a private on-premises cloud with Kubernetes multi-cluster support, a private 5G core orchestrator with an access gateway and a test bed, an in-house learning management system, a media lab, a robotics lab and an accounting and finance lab.

The college is also one of only two institutions in the University of Delhi to hold a Malaviya Mission Teacher Training Centre. Since October 2017 that centre has run over 100 programmes and trained more than 1.5 lakh teachers from across the country, according to the prospectus, which makes teacher training a genuine second business of this college rather than a line in a brochure.

On the physical campus, the college's infrastructure list covers solar panels, a rainwater harvesting plant, a sewage treatment plant, an ECOMAN solid waste disposal machine, ICT-enabled smart classrooms, multiple computer laboratories, seminar halls, a language and media lab, a psychology lab, an indoor gymnasium-cum-sports room, a fully equipped medical room and a canteen. On accessibility, its NIRF 2026 filing answers yes to lifts or ramps in more than 80% of buildings, to wheelchairs and walking aids, and to specially designed toilets in more than 80% of buildings.

One thing is missing from every one of those lists: somewhere to sleep. Residence does not feature in the college's facilities at all and there is no accommodation page on its site, which lands awkwardly on a campus where most undergraduates have come from outside Delhi. Treat the rent as part of the cost of the seat, and put the question to the office directly rather than assuming a room comes attached to the allocation.

Two teaching bodies share one roster here and they are not doing the same job. The NIRF 2026 return lists 141 teachers, 122 of them on regular terms and 19 on adhoc or contractual ones. The regular block is doctoral in the large majority of cases; of the 19 adhoc entries, only 2 hold a doctorate and the rest are at master's level.

Neither block is as settled as the word permanent suggests, and they are unsettled in opposite ways. A large share of the regular entries record a joining date in 2023 and 17 of the 19 adhoc entries joined in 2024, so most of this roster was assembled inside three years. What separates them is what happened after that: 11 of the 19 adhoc and contractual teachers carry a leaving date, every one of them in August or September 2025, against a single departure across the whole regular block. The churn sits entirely on one side.

Whom you are actually taught by is a departmental question, not a college-wide one. Computer Science puts its strength at eight assistant professors in the prospectus; Commerce describes itself in the same document as the department with the highest student strength in the college. Prof. Rasal Singh has been Principal since August 2024 on the NIRF filing, and the college's own account of who chairs its governing body differs between its two current publications, so that post is best confirmed with the office rather than taken off a listing page.

The campus is a single site in Kalkaji, in south Delhi, and enquiries are routed by function rather than through one switchboard, so which address you use depends on what you are asking.

One line on the alumni association's own page is a reminder of how recent the name is: it counts alumni of Ramanujan College and of Deshbandhu College (Evening) from 1958 onwards as a single body.

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