Shivaji College

Shivaji College scored better in NIRF 2025 than it did the year before and still fell twenty places. Its overall score rose from 56.11 to 57.48 between the 2024 and 2025 college tables, while its rank moved from 49 to 69, which is why the college's own website still carries the older number in several places. That gap between a rising score and a falling rank is the first honest thing to know about this University of Delhi college on Ring Road at Raja Garden, and the rest of this page sets out what its published cutoffs, seat matrix, fees and outcome data actually say.

Shivaji College is a co-educational constituent college of the University of Delhi in west Delhi, teaching humanities, commerce and science on a single campus at Raja Garden. Dr. Panjabrao Deshmukh, the Union Minister for Agriculture and a farmer-leader, founded it in 1961 to bring degree education to what was then the largely rural belt around Matiala. The Delhi government took over its trusteeship in 1967 and moved it to Karampura, and the college reached its present Ring Road site in 1976, as its college profile records. That profile closes on the college motto, Amritam Tu Vidya.

It is neither a North Campus nor a South Campus college, which changes both the commute and the pool of applicants who put it first. Its own college profile puts the share of students from beyond Delhi at over 47 per cent, and the campus carries two open-learning operations on top of its regular roll: an Indira Gandhi National Open University study centre running since 2019 for over 3,400 students with nearly 50 academic counsellors, and a School of Open Learning centre supporting over 1,000 more. On any given day the buildings hold several thousand more people than the degree register accounts for.

The government-submitted NIRF 2025 data puts that geographic spread higher still. It records 1455 of the college's 2740 four-year undergraduates and 695 of its 1296 three-year undergraduates as coming from outside the state, which makes out-of-Delhi students the majority rather than a minority on both rolls.

The college holds Grade "A" from the National Assessment and Accreditation Council, per its own NAAC page, and Prof Virender Bhardwaj, listed there as chairperson of the Internal Quality Assurance Cell, is the Principal.

Shivaji College teaches 20 undergraduate courses and three postgraduate courses through 18 departments, the count its own departments page states directly and the number its courses offered list adds up to when read line by line. The college's alumni association page says 26 undergraduate courses against the same 18 departments, so treat that higher figure as unreconciled; the two admission-side pages agree with each other and with what the University of Delhi actually advertises seats for. The undergraduate catalogue splits into eight B.A. (Hons.) subjects, six B.Sc. (Hons.) subjects, the two B.Com. routes, three B.Sc. programme routes and the B.A. programme route, with B.A. (Hons.) Business Economics run as the college's only self-financing degree. Postgraduate teaching is deliberately narrow: M.A. in Hindi, Political Science and Sanskrit, and nothing else, per the courses offered list.

Fees are where this page can be specific in a way most listings are not, because the college prints a full head-by-head table in its prospectus for 2025-26. The totals below are the whole first-year admission fee, university charges included.

A security deposit of ₹2,000 is refundable and sits inside every total in the college's fee structure, so the real first-year outlay is that much lower in each row. And the self-financing Business Economics degree at ₹37,595 is not marginally dearer than the ₹20,570 humanities figure, it is in a different bracket altogether, so price it as a different kind of decision from the rest of the college.

The gaps between those rows are not prestige loadings, and the same fee table shows exactly what each one buys. The ₹20,570 column carries no laboratory or computer heads at all. The science column adds a UGC laboratory fee of ₹120, a laboratory maintenance charge of ₹2,000 and a computer maintenance fee of ₹1,000, and those three lines are the whole distance to ₹23,690, in the fee structure. Biochemistry's laboratory maintenance charge is ₹3,000 rather than ₹2,000 in the same table, which is the whole distance to ₹24,690. Geography's ₹1,000 premium over the other humanities honours is a single line too, a laboratory maintenance charge the English and History rows do not carry.

The college also runs a fee concession that is unusually explicit about its range. Its Fee Concession Committee grants relief of between 10 per cent and 60 per cent of total college fees, decided after an interview with each applicant and weighed on family economic status, academic performance and conduct, with continuation dependent on attendance and results. Self-financing Business Economics is excluded from it.

That concession is not a token scheme. In 2024-25 the college recorded concessions totalling ₹11,97,200 across 151 students, including full waivers for 85 students, made up of 30 students with disabilities, 52 orphaned students and 3 meritorious ones, according to its own prospectus.

Separate merit awards run alongside it. The same prospectus records HANA Scholarships, funded from South Korea, paying ₹42,358 each to 16 students in that year, and the college profile names the Dr. Usha Aggarwal Trust, Satya Pal Bansal Memorial and Sultan Chand Dropadi Devi Foundation awards alongside the University of Delhi Vice Chancellor's Student Fund.

The college's admissions page is a list of courses and a set of links out to the University of Delhi's bulletins, and that is an accurate description of how much of the decision it controls. Shivaji appears in the process twice, both times after the allocation has already been made: it verifies the documents inside the window the university sets, and it takes the fee. Nothing a candidate says or shows to this college changes which programme they are allocated. What is worth planning around, and what the college does publish, is the calendar that verification sits inside.

The 2025-26 schedule printed in the college prospectus shows how compressed that window is. Preference filling opened on 8 July 2025 and auto-locked at 11:59 PM on 14 July, simulated ranks were declared on 15 July, the first allocation list came at 5 PM on 19 July, and the fee for a first-round seat had to be paid by 4:59 PM on 23 July. Four days from allocation to payment, with the college's verification running in parallel, is the operational fact that catches applicants out.

Delhi University's supernumerary quotas apply here as they do across its colleges, and the college prospectus reproduces them without variation. Two of them land differently at Shivaji than they would elsewhere. The Sikkim nomination route is open only where hostel facilities exist, and this college publishes none, so it is closed here in practice. The University of Delhi ward quota is settled in three programme clusters, Humanities, Commerce and Sciences, and Shivaji teaches in all three, so an employee's ward has a route into each. The University's own seat matrix puts numbers on the disability, armed-forces and Kashmiri-migrant heads for this college: 3 seats each against a 23-seat unreserved honours course and 6 each against the 115-seat courses, and 0 against both the Sikh and the Christian minority columns, which Shivaji does not carry.

The sports route is where a Shivaji applicant most needs the current year's document rather than last year's, because this college rewrites its games list rather than adjusting it. The 2025-26 prospectus offered 31 sports seats in chess for men and women at 6 each, basketball for women at 10 and volleyball for women at 9, with no cricket at all. The university's college-wise sports seat matrix for 2026-27 keeps the total at 31 and changes almost everything under it: cricket 18 for men, chess 6 for men, basketball 7 for women, and volleyball gone. A women's chess player who qualified for this college a year ago has no seat to apply against now; a male cricketer has 18. The 2025-26 prospectus also sets out the weighting the university applies to both supernumerary routes, 25 per cent on the CUET score and 75 per cent on certificates, trials and performances.

The extra-curricular list is steadier and much wider. The college-wise ECA seat matrix for 2026-27 gives Shivaji 45 seats, with the two largest single blocks in Indian folk dance and Indian vocal music at 4 each and theatre at 5, alongside western and classical dance, choreography, debate in Hindi and English, photography, film-making, sketching, sculpture, tabla, harmonium, flute, sitar, drums, bass guitar, keyboard, NCC at 5 across men and women, and NSS at 4.

Postgraduate entry is a different system with a different score. The three M.A. programmes are filled on CUET (PG) through the University's Common Seat Allocation System for postgraduates, and the two-year PG Bulletin of Information for 2026-27 splits every M.A. seat into two eligibility categories: C1 for a bachelor's degree carrying at least eight credits in the subject from any recognised university, C2 for a Delhi University degree in it. Both categories sit an M.A. applicant against a different competing pool, so which one you fall into matters more here than at undergraduate level, where there is only one merit list per category.

Shivaji College occupies 29 rows of Delhi University's first-round allocation list for 2026-27, one for every undergraduate programme it teaches, and every figure in them is an output of that round rather than a bar set before it. They are grouped by stream below rather than ranked by score, because what each stream does is the pattern worth seeing here.

Commerce and the social sciences:

The ten B.A. programme pairs, each a two-discipline degree with its own row:

The sciences:

The range inside one college is enormous. The university's own list closed unreserved B.Com. (Hons.) at 756.649 and unreserved B.A. (Hons.) Hindi at 270.1578, on the same merit scale in the same building, in the same round.

That bottom row deserves a second look, because it sits alongside the college's strongest single-subject claim. Shivaji's own rankings page records an 8th rank for B.A. (Hindi) in the India Today MDRA rankings for 2025, the only subject-level placing it claims anywhere. The department carrying that placing is also the one whose unreserved seats close lowest of the twenty-nine, and the two facts do not contradict each other: a closing score records how many people wanted the last seat, not how well the subject is taught.

Sanskrit and one of the geography pairs break the expected order between the reserved columns, and it would be a mistake to read either as a soft entry. In the first-round list, B.A. (Hons.) Sanskrit closed OBC-NCL at 87.4496, well below its SC figure of 243.5895, while B.A. Programme (Geography + History) closed SC at 545.0169, above its OBC-NCL figure of 529.7937. The blocks behind those columns are small, at 15 OBC-NCL and 9 SC places in Sanskrit and 8 and 4 in the geography pair, and the applicant pools that feed them are smaller still, so the last-placed score in a reserved column can land almost anywhere.

By the spot round on 27 August 2026 the college was still releasing seats in twenty of its twenty-nine programmes, and the scores that came back are the argument against assuming a late round is a cheap one. B.Com. (Hons.) still closed unreserved at 737.4702. B.Sc. (Hons.) Mathematics closed unreserved at 530.4983, above the 523.4616 it had taken in the first round. B.A. (Hons.) Hindi, the lowest close in the college in round one, took its OBC-NCL spot seat at 347.4354 against a first-round figure of 157.9869, more than double. Only B.A. (Hons.) English moved the way a spot round is supposed to, closing at 648.0942 against 658.648 in round one. A single vacant seat late in the cycle can be contested by whoever is left holding a high score, and here it often was.

Shivaji's 2023-24 cohort split three ways, and its NIRF 2025 submission counts each part. Out of the 1106 students who completed a three-year degree in the stipulated time, 653 moved into higher study; 316 took a job, at a reported median of 500000 rupees a year; the rest did neither. These are figures the college filed with the government, not copy written for recruiters.

Read that table the way a Delhi University undergraduate should: this is not a placement college, it is a springboard. Students continuing to a master's or professional course outnumbered students taking a job in every one of the three years, by more than seven to one in 2021-22 and by about two to one by 2023-24 as the placed count climbed and the graduating cohort drifted down. On the postgraduate side the numbers are smaller and thinner still, with 8 of 26 M.A. graduates placed in 2023-24 at a reported median of 470000 rupees, per the same submission.

The college's own Placement and Internship Cell names Deloitte and Accenture among recent campus recruiters, and states on that page that the highest package offered to a Shivaji student to date is 24 lakh rupees per annum. Its own placement brochure prints a summary panel headed 2024-25 that puts the highest package at 8 lakh rupees, footnoted "Base Year: 2023-24", and gives placement counts the same document's prose contradicts a page earlier. Two figures from the same cell, a factor of three apart, with no year attached to the larger one: neither belongs in a plan. The government-filed medians in the table above carry a year each, which is why this page uses them and leaves that panel out.

Its own year is documented too. Across 2024-25 the cell facilitated 63 final placements and 122 internship offers, and its flagship recruitment fair Crescita ran from 7 to 9 April 2025 in a hybrid format, drawing more than 60 companies and over 300 student applicants; 27 companies made placement offers and 33 offered internships, 91 students were shortlisted and 23 received final offers, per its placement brochure.

Shivaji College is a large college by intake. The University of Delhi's seat matrix for 2026-27 gives it 29 undergraduate programmes, and the merit intake across them matches the sanctioned strength of 1519 undergraduate places that the college reported in its NIRF 2025 submission. The distribution is heavily weighted toward a handful of large courses.

The college's own courses and seat matrix document states the totals those columns add to. Four courses carry 115 places each, B.Com., B.Com. (Hons.), B.Sc. (Hons.) Mathematics and B.Sc. (Prog.) Life Science, which is why they absorb so much of the allocation list before they close. Business Economics, Physics and Physical Science with Computer Science carry 78 each, the seven single-subject B.A. honours degrees carry 57 each, and the four smaller science honours carry 39. Set that against the cutoff tables above: a small course with a high closing score is the combination to preference early rather than treat as a fallback.

One line in the college's document hides the most consequential decision in the whole matrix. It sanctions the B.A. Programme as a single block of 231 seats, in the courses and seat matrix document. The university's matrix then breaks that block into ten named discipline pairs of wildly unequal size: History with Political Science takes 27 unreserved places, while Economics with Geography, Hindi with Geography and Hindi with Political Science take 5 unreserved places each. A candidate who preferences the B.A. Programme without naming which pair is preferencing nothing, because the university allocates against the pair, not the block.

Postgraduate intake is where the college's own paperwork has fallen behind. Its courses document still lists 25 places in each of the three M.A. programmes, a total of 75, and the NIRF 2025 return reports exactly that sanctioned PG intake for 2022-23 before showing it cut to 41 for 2023-24. The University's two-year PG Bulletin of Information for 2026-27 settles which of the two is current: it gives Shivaji 14 M.A. Hindi seats, 15 in Sanskrit and 12 in Political Science across the C1 and C2 eligibility categories, 41 in all, matching the NIRF figure and not the college's own page. The same return records the size of the problem behind that cut, with 36 of 75 postgraduate places actually taken up in 2022-23.

NIRF ranks this college in one table and no other. Constituent colleges of Delhi University are outside its university list entirely, so the college category is the whole of Shivaji's government ranking record, and its NIRF 2025 entry there is rank 69 on an overall score of 57.48.

The year-on-year comparison explains the paradox in the opening line. Between NIRF 2024 and NIRF 2025 the college's research score climbed from 52.51 to 63.33 and its graduation outcomes held steady at 76.04 and then 76.83, while its perception score fell from 5.09 to 2.84 and its teaching score slipped from 56.65 to 55.88. The net was a rise from 56.11 to 57.48 in the total and a fall from rank 49 to rank 69, which means the colleges around it improved faster than it did rather than that it got worse. Its research parameter is the one moving, up nearly 11 points in a year; its perception parameter, at 2.84, is close to the floor of the scale and is what holds the total down.

The college's other national placements come from the India Today MDRA rankings, which it publishes year by year on its own rankings page. Its 2026 results there are an all-India 25th for B.Com. with a Delhi rank of 14, 30th for B.Sc. at 15 in Delhi and 37th for B.A. at 17, against 2025 results of 23rd in Commerce, 32nd in Sciences and 36th in Humanities. That is a magazine ranking rather than a government one and should be weighed accordingly, but the ordering it shows is consistent with everything else on this page: commerce first, science second, humanities third.

Eighteen departments teach the college's 20 undergraduate and three postgraduate courses, and the departments list names them in full: Biochemistry, Botany, Business Economics, Chemistry, Commerce, Computer Science, Economics, English, Environmental Studies, Geography, Hindi, History, Mathematics, Physical Education, Physics, Political Science, Sanskrit and Zoology.

Computer Science sits on that list without an honours degree behind it. It anchors the B.Sc. (Prog.) Physical Science with Computer Science route, one of the college's larger science intakes, and nothing more. Sociology is not a department here at all and appears only as half of the B.A. Programme (English + Sociology) pair. If either subject is what you want to specialise in, this is not the Delhi University college for it.

Geography is the department with the most distinct identity. Its entry in the prospectus dates the department to over 39 years and its honours course to 1988, and records two laboratories, one for GIS and remote sensing and one for cartography and spatial visualisation, which is consistent with B.A. (Hons.) Geography sitting in its own fee band above the other humanities honours.

Beyond the departments the college runs several named centres, including the Centre for Environment and Disaster Management, a College Research and Innovation Cell whose Intramural Research Scheme sanctioned five minor research projects at a grant of 1 lakh rupees each in 2024-25, and a Skill Development Centre for Python programming and data analysis, all described in the same prospectus.

The campus runs to 10 acres, with a built-up teaching and administrative area of 10,002 square metres holding 49 lecture rooms, 14 science laboratories and 4 computer laboratories, according to the college profile. Most lecture rooms carry multimedia projection.

The newest part of it is the Jijabai Academic Block, inaugurated in February 2024, which the college profile records as adding six advanced laboratories, eight research laboratories, three auditoria with multimedia facilities, a multipurpose hall and lifts. The prospectus adds that the block houses air-conditioned departmental rooms and laboratories for Biochemistry, Botany, Chemistry, English and Political Science, and that the Physics and Environmental Science departments moved back into the old building to make room.

The library, Bhushan Granthalaya, held 83,983 books at the end of 2024-25 after adding 1,386 that year, alongside 7 print journals and 18 magazines, per the prospectus. It runs KOHA library software with barcoded and RFID-tagged stock, one reading hall with a seating capacity of 90 and two computer halls seating 75 students and 15 faculty.

Its provision for visually challenged students is itemised rather than described. The same document lists 3 talking digital portable Daisy players, 29 tape recorders, 9 iPods, 2 Braille kits, one Lex Air portable camera reading system and a notebook computer held for that purpose, and the college told NIRF that lifts or ramps and specially designed toilets are present in more than 80 per cent of its buildings, in its NIRF 2025 return.

Sports facilities cover a football field, a cricket ground with practice nets, basketball, volleyball and tennis courts, athletics, indoor table tennis and chess, a gymnasium, floodlighting and changing rooms, per the college profile. Everyday amenities include an air-conditioned cafeteria, furnished common rooms for men and women, a Central Bank of India branch inside the college, two photocopying centres, and a World University Service health centre offering emergency care and free consultation at an annual rate of 120 rupees, all set out in the prospectus.

Environmental measures on campus include a solar power plant, a sewage treatment plant of more than 27 lakh litres, RO wastewater reuse, vermicomposting and food-waste processing units, a beehive in the herbal garden, LED lighting and a vehicle-free, smoke-free campus, per the college profile and the prospectus.

Shivaji College publishes no student hostel. Its prospectus itemises campus infrastructure down to the photocopying counters and the banking branch, and the only mentions of hostels anywhere in it are in university-wide ordinance text and in the Sikkim nomination rule, which restricts that route to colleges where hostel facilities are available. The college profile does refer to residential complexes on the campus, but no page on the site attaches a warden, an application, an eligibility rule or a fee to them, and no student accommodation is listed anywhere.

That absence is worth more than a footnote here, because the same college's NIRF 2025 return records 1455 of 2740 four-year undergraduates and 695 of 1296 three-year undergraduates as coming from outside the state. Shivaji admits an out-of-Delhi majority and houses none of it. Accommodation is therefore a private arrangement made off-campus and a cost this page cannot quote, because the college publishes no rate for something it does not provide. Settle it before accepting a seat rather than after.

Two hundred faculty members went into the college's NIRF 2025 submission, against a sanctioned undergraduate intake of 1519 in the same return. That is not the only figure the college has published: its alumni association page counts 184 teachers and 107 non-teaching personnel. The NIRF number is the one filed with the government and dated to a submission year, so it is the one used here, but a prospective student should know the college's own web pages differ by sixteen posts and treat any staff-to-student ratio built on either as approximate.

Several senior faculty supervise PhD scholars registered with the University of Delhi and hold UGC-sponsored research projects, and the college's prospectus records that its intramural research grant per project rose from ₹30,000 to ₹1,00,000, that four extramural research projects are running with external funding agencies, and that patent work is under way in AI-driven analytics, IoT and nanotechnology. Qualification-wise listings for teaching and non-teaching staff sit under each department's own page on the college website.

The college's notable alumni register is organised by field and gives each person's programme and years, which makes it checkable in a way most such lists are not. The heaviest concentration is in the civil services and the sciences.

Among civil servants the register names Dr. Adarsh Swaika of the Indian Foreign Service, currently Ambassador of India to Kuwait, who read B.Sc. (Hons.) Chemistry from 1992 to 1995; Ajit Vasant of the IAS, District Collector of Korba in Chhattisgarh, from B.A. (Hons.) History; and Harish Dayama of the IPS, a joint commissioner of police in Ludhiana, from B.Sc. (Prog.) Life Science. In the sciences it lists Professor Anil Grover, a B.Sc. (Hons.) Botany alumnus who went on to head the Department of Plant Molecular Biology at Delhi University's South Campus, and Professor Girdhar K. Pandey of B.Sc. (Hons.) Biochemistry, now a professor in that same department, both recipients of the Department of Biotechnology's National Bioscience Award for Career Development.

Two names sit apart from the rest, and they are the college's own record rather than an independently checkable one. Both the register and the alumni association page list Captain Haneef Uddin and Captain Sumeet Roy as Kargil casualties awarded the Vir Chakra posthumously, and the association calls them its point of pride. Neither entry carries a course or a year, unlike every other name on the register, and the Ministry of Defence gallantry awards portal returns no record against either name for public search, so this page reports the claim as the college's and does not restate it as an independent fact. In arts and entertainment the best-known name on the register is the actor Tanya Maniktala, listed as B.A. (Hons.) English from 2015 to 2018. Senior Advocate N. Hariharan of the Delhi High Court, from B.Sc. (Hons.) Botany, heads the legal entries.

Shivaji College does not run a news page, so the datable events sit inside its other documents. The Shivaji College Alumni Association was constituted under the Societies Registration Act of 1860 on September 17, 2024, registration number SOCIETY/WEST/2024/8902807, which is recent enough that the college's alumni network is still being assembled rather than drawn on. Its prospectus records eight interdisciplinary and inter-college add-on courses run in 2024-25, and the Shivraj 350 programme, which marked the 350th anniversary of Shivaji Maharaj's coronation across 2023-24 and left behind a multidisciplinary journal the college still publishes.

The current teaching partnerships named in that document are with IIT Bombay's Spoken Tutorial project, the E&ICT Academy at IIT Kanpur and the Sherlock Institute of Forensic Science. For admission notices specifically, the operative documents are the University of Delhi's rather than the college's: the CSAS schedule, the round-wise minimum allocation scores and the vacant-seat lists all originate at the admission branch.

The nearest comparison is also the most literal one. Rajdhani College publishes its address as Mahatma Gandhi Marg, Raja Garden, the same locality Shivaji names in its own, and in the 2026-27 first round its unreserved B.Com. (Hons.) closed at 733.5262 against Shivaji's 756.649, with B.A. (Hons.) Economics at 678.21 against 709.7629. On the two degrees they both teach and most applicants both want, Shivaji closes the higher of the pair.

Widen it and Shivaji sits mid-bracket rather than at either end. The same document closed unreserved B.Com. (Hons.) at 836.8295 at Shaheed Bhagat Singh College and at 706.2486 at Shyam Lal College, so a commerce applicant holding a score in the 730s to 750s is choosing inside that band rather than above it.

Where Shivaji gives ground is subject range rather than score. There is no Computer Science honours degree, no Sociology honours, no B.Com. specialisation beyond the two standard routes, and only three postgraduate subjects, so a comparison that starts from the specific programme you want will settle this faster than any rank will.

The campus is on Ring Road at Raja Garden in west Delhi.

The Placement and Internship Cell publishes a separate address, placement@shivaji.du.ac.in, in its own brochure, and runs distinct student and recruiter registration routes from its cell page.

At a glance

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