University College Of Pharmaceutical Sciences

Andhra Pradesh counselled a B.Pharm seat at Acharya Nagarjuna University College of Pharmaceutical Sciences for a college fee of Rs 37,500 in the 2023 cycle, the lowest figure against any pharmacy college in the Guntur district list. The master's degree on the same campus is the expensive one, priced at more than three times that, which is the reverse of what most applicants assume. The national ranking adds a third surprise: the college ends its four-year run in the table with a marginally better total score than it started with and sixteen places lower, with the parameter that measures research down to 3.17 out of 100.

The name in the national records is bare. It reads University College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, with no city in it, and the Pharmacy Council of India register carries five entries whose names all resolve to some university's college of pharmaceutical sciences, split between Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The Guntur one is PCI code 2528, University College Of Pharmaceutical Sciences Acharya Nagarjuna University Guntur Andhra Pradesh, approved for 100 B.Pharm admissions. Three of the four beside it sit in Telangana at consecutive file numbers: 2526 is Kakatiya University's at Warangal, 2527 is Satavahana University's at Karimnagar and 2529 is Palamuru University's at Mahabubnagar. The fifth shares this state: 2298, Sri Krishnadevaraya University's college at Anantapuramu. Everything below describes the Guntur one, and a figure that reaches you attached to the bare name is worth tracing to a state first.

A third variant comes from the university's own admissions office, which advertised the master's seats under the heading University College of Pharmacy, Acharya Nagarjuna University, a third variant for the same block on the same campus.

The college is young. Its older ANU site says the university started A.N.U. College of Pharmaceutical Sciences in the academic year 2010-11, the inspection format filed with the Pharmacy Council for the 2017-18 session records the year of establishment as 2010, and the state council's counselling sheet prints 2010 against its institution code ANUPSF.

It is a campus college rather than an affiliated one, and it files its own NIRF return. That return counts 420 students on the four-year degree and 95 on the two-year master's, with women in the majority in both, at 225 of 420 and 58 of 95. Recruitment is almost entirely in-state: 372 undergraduates from within Andhra Pradesh, 43 from other states and 5 from outside India. Six departments carry the teaching, and the odd one out is Pharmacognosy: it sits on the college's own departmental list beside Pharmaceutical Analysis, Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Pharmaceutical Sciences, Pharmaceutics and Industrial Pharmacy, and Pharmacology, yet in the M.Pharm inspection format the college filed with the Pharmacy Council it is the one specialisation entered with no year of start and no admissions against it.

The office sits on the campus at NH16, Nagarjuna Nagar, Guntur, Andhra Pradesh 522510, and the number the college itself filed with the Pharmacy Council is 0863 2346459. The line printed in the site header is the university switchboard rather than a departmental desk.

Two degrees are taught here plus doctoral work, and the Pharm.D that private colleges in this district run is not among them.

Read the bottom three rows against the top one. A bachelor's seat filled through state counselling is charged well under half a lakh, while the master's on the same campus is priced at Rs 1,10,000 of tuition plus Rs 8,500 of special fee, identically across every specialisation. Budget the second degree before you accept the first, because on this campus the postgraduate year is not the subsidised one. Every figure in that table is dated for a reason: the university prices its seats inside the notification for a particular counselling round rather than in a standing fee schedule, and no current one for either degree, nor any fee at all for the doctoral programme, is published on its site.

Which specialisations exist depends on which document you read. The 2022 vacancy sheet names Pharmaceutical Analysis, Pharmaceutics, Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Pharmacology, Industrial Pharmacy and Pharmacognosy, six of them. The college's own M.Pharm inspection format, older, listed five with their start years.

That filing is old enough to read as history, and it dates itself: it records the bachelor's degree alongside as approved upto 2014-15. The gap it leaves is the live question. Those five specialisations carry eighteen filed seats each, two of them raised to twenty four, comfortably more than the sanctioned postgraduate intake of 45 the college filed for 2023-24, so which specialisations actually open in a given year is what an M.Pharm applicant has to ask.

Neither degree is filled by the college. Both are filled by Andhra Pradesh, through AP EAPCET at bachelor's level and AP PGECET at master's level, and the bachelor's seat is reachable from either intermediate group. When leftover places had to be filled for 2022-23, the notice ANU put out called for qualified rankers of APEAPCET-2022 in the Bi.P.C. stream into B. Pharmacy courses in the University Campus College; the state council's engineering-stream last rank sheet, meanwhile, prints a B.Pharmacy closing rank against this college too. The council's agriculture and pharmacy booklet asks for an intermediate examination on the 10+2 pattern with biology, physics and chemistry, and for the candidate to have completed 16 years of age by the date admissions commence, with no upper age limit.

The master's runs off the postgraduate state test, where the same booklet ranks GATE and GPAT holders ahead of the state test itself and reserves 85% of the seats in each course for local candidates. Leftover seats at this college go to APPGECET rank holders as first priority on merit, with the vacancies treated as open category. There is no interview and no internal weighting anywhere in either route.

One clause decides whether a late seat is worth taking, and it costs more here than almost anywhere else on this campus. Candidates admitted in the spot round are not eligible for tuition fee reimbursement vide G.O.Ms.No.66, SW-Edn., Department, dated 08-09-2010. On a bachelor's seat that exposes the Rs 31,000 course fee the university printed for the spot round. On the master's it exposes the full Rs 1,18,500.

Doctoral entry is notified separately, and the campus college is not where the capacity sits. One seat notification carries Pharmaceutical Sciences at Acharya Nagarjuna University with 2 and 1 full time seats and none part time, against 12 and 7 full time plus 5 and 1 part time at the university's affiliating research centre. A doctorate in this subject under this university's name is more likely to be supervised at an affiliated college than at Nagarjuna Nagar, so ask which before you accept.

A closing rank only exists once counselling has finished, and the published one covers a single stream. The sheet is headed APEAPCET-2023 M P C STREAM last rank details, so it ranks candidates who sat the mathematics group; the biology group is counselled on its own list, under the council's separate agriculture and pharmacy instruction booklet, and no equivalent published rank sheet for that group turned up. On the sheet that is published, every category column filled for institution code ANUPSF carries the identical figure, 139222, and the two economically weaker section columns are left blank. No quota became the binding constraint there.

Set against the rest of the district, though, that number is not the outlier it looks like on its own.

This college is the cheapest B.Pharm seat on that list and it closes sixth of the thirteen, with all seven colleges behind it charging more. The one seat in Guntur that genuinely demands a rank is a private one, Priyadarshini at 33609, and it costs Rs 500 more. Between those two you are choosing on teaching and outcomes, not on money.

Nothing equivalent is published for the master's. No APPGECET closing rank for any specialisation here appears on the university's site or the state council's, so read the postgraduate cutoff as unpublished rather than as low.

The college files three years of outcomes, and the bachelor's degree here is not primarily a route to a job.

The undergraduate median has nearly doubled and the placed share has moved from about one in seven to about one in four, yet further study is still where most of the cohort goes: 78 of the 109 who finished in 2023-24, against 74 of 86 three years earlier. The master's inverts that on both counts, placing nearly everyone while its cohort shrank from 62 graduating at Rs 3,30,000 to 48 graduating at Rs 6,00,000.

The university also publishes a per-student placement register, and its pharmacy block names destinations the filing never does. The 2022-2023 register carries a quality control intern at Dr. Reddy's Laboratories at Rs 5,00,000, a quality assurance trainee at GeneSys Biologics at Rs 5,00,000, and entries at Hetero Labs, MSN Pharma, Avaca Pharma and AET Laboratories, alongside IQVIA, which the register describes as a human data science company, and Accenture India. Its largest pharmacy figure is not a pharmaceutical job at all: an M. Pharmacy graduate at the Life Insurance Corporation of India, Machilipatnam division, at Rs 7,71,420.

The two documents disagree for the same graduating year and neither defines what placed means, so use them for different jobs. The medians above are the only placement rates this college has filed, and it has never filed a recruiter list or a highest package.

Sanctioned intake is filed once a year, and this college's has moved.

Both taught programmes were cut in the same year, the undergraduate one from 110 to 100 and the postgraduate one from 50 to 45. What was offered and what was filled are different numbers, and the gap has closed. In the three admission years the return reports a first-year intake for, 2018-19 to 2020-21, the 100 places filled 76, then 81, then 99, so a course that was a quarter empty now fills. A 2017-18 filing shows a different mismatch again, between the approving bodies rather than between approval and admission: 100 from the Pharmacy Council against 120 from the state government and 120 from the university, with 100 actually admitted.

Where the master's vacancies sat in a recent cycle is more useful than the total. Going into the 2022 spot round the specialisations were left with no general vacancy in Pharmaceutical Analysis, 1 in Pharmaceutics, 2 each in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Pharmacology, 4 in Industrial Pharmacy and 15 in Pharmacognosy. Pharmacognosy carried more unfilled seats than the other five combined. On the bachelor's side the leftover was small, at 10 vacant B.Pharmacy places in the equivalent round.

Four consecutive pharmacy tables carry this college, and reading them by rank and reading them by score give opposite answers.

Four of the five parameters improved between the last two tables and the total score went up, and the college still slid four places, which is what a rising floor does to a college holding a score in the mid-forties. Over the whole run the total has barely moved, from 46.04 in 2022 to 46.34 in 2025, while the rank has gone from 51st to 67th.

One column is doing the damage. Research and professional practice fell from 9.97 in 2022 to 3.17 in 2025, a rounding error away from zero, while teaching climbed to 68.05 and graduation outcomes to 75.32. The college's own return explains that figure without argument: across 2021-22, 2022-23 and 2023-24 it enters zero sponsored projects, zero funding agencies, zero consultancy projects and zero rupees received under either head.

Grant money has reached this college before. Its older ANU profile names an AICTE research promotion scheme of Rs.15,00,000 on transdermal patches for breast cancer and a UGC major research project of Rs.11,80,000 on controlled release formulations of anti-HIV drugs, both with the Principal as investigator. Neither is dated on that page, and neither can fall inside the three years the ranking counts, which the return fills with zeros. A taught degree feels that column less than the teaching one. A doctoral applicant should put it to a prospective supervisor directly, before choosing a topic that needs funding.

Which departments exist here is answered differently at bachelor's and master's level, and the college's two Pharmacy Council inspection formats are where that difference shows.

At bachelor's level a department is defined by the laboratories it holds, and the 2017-18 format breaks the block's teaching laboratories down by subject instead of leaving them as one total.

Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Chemistry hold the two largest areas on that sheet, and Pharmaceutical Biotechnology has a laboratory of its own there without appearing on the college's departmental list at all.

The master's side is narrower than either list suggests. The council's M.Pharm format prints a fixed menu of specialisations and asks for a year of start against each; this college filled five of them and entered NA against Pharmaceutical Technology, Pharmaceutical Quality Assurance, Regulatory Affairs, Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, Pharmacy Practice, Pharmacognosy, and Phytopharmacy and Phytomedicine. The same five and the same seven repeat down every page of that form: a classroom of 36 square metres and a laboratory of 75 square metres are entered against Pharmaceutics, Industrial Pharmacy, Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Pharmaceutical Analysis and Pharmacology, and NA against the rest.

Lecturers are where the departments run thin. Sized against a hundred-seat bachelor's programme, the same form asks for three lecturers in Pharmaceutics and enters two, three in the combined Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Analysis department and enters one, and three in Pharmacology and enters none at all. The professor and assistant professor lines in all three of those departments are filled.

For the master's the council makes the department rather than the college the unit that has to be staffed. A department introducing an M.Pharm specialisation must carry two additional postgraduate teachers, hold a minimum of five faculty, and admit three students per postgraduate teacher. Against that rule the form enters one associate professor and one assistant professor or lecturer in Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Pharmacology, Industrial Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Analysis, and one associate professor with two more alongside in Pharmaceutics. Which department administers the specialisation you want is worth asking before you accept a postgraduate seat, because the department, not the college, is what the intake is sized against.

The physical inventory this college published for inspection is more concrete than anything on its current website, and also considerably older. The 2017-18 format, filed on the university's older site, records a built up area of 3209 square metres with a further 1181 in amenities and circulation, 12 laboratories over 1176 square metres, an animal house of 140 square metres, a library of 167 square metres and a herbal garden of 13,071 square metres.

Instrumentation is where that filing earns its keep. It lists a central instrumentation room holding HPLC, HPTLC, a Fourier Transform Infra Red Spectrometer, an atomic absorption and emission spectrophotometer, a carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen analyzer and a lyophilizer, and a library of 510 titles across 4459 volumes with 25 periodicals, open from 9.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m.

Equipment spending has risen every year since, which for a pharmacy degree is the money that shows up in practicals.

Accommodation here is a university function rather than a college one, which changes who you ask and what you can find out in advance. The pharmacy block's own inspection filing records a boys' hostel and a girls' hostel of 4000 square metres each, both entered under the council's desirable heading rather than its essential one, and both measured against a norm the same form prints as 9 square metres per room at single occupancy, or 20 square metres per room at triple occupancy for the girls' hostel. Those areas belong to a campus the filing describes as multi institutional, so the rooms are shared university stock and not something the pharmacy college allots.

The contact directory on ANU's older site follows the same logic. It prints separate lines for the boys' hostel wardens on 0863-2346129 and the girls' hostel wardens on 0863-2346184, listed under a hostels heading of their own rather than under the university colleges, so a room enquiry never passes through the pharmacy office.

No tariff exists to quote. Neither degree's counselling notification carries a hostel rent or a mess charge, the college's council filings give areas without prices, and the one expenditure head in the ranking return that could have held an accommodation figure is written to exclude it, reading maintenance of academic infrastructure or consumables and other running expenditures excluding maintenance of hostels and allied services. Treat the cost as unknown until the warden's office quotes it. The same inspection filing also enters no transport facility for students among its desirable amenities, so the alternative to a hostel room is a commute to Nagarjuna Nagar you arrange yourself.

The number filed and the number named do not match. The return enters 45 faculty members. The department's teaching page lists 11 staff under the College: Pharmaceutical Sciences heading, eight of them appointed in 2012, and Prof. A. Prameela Rani, named as principal on the department's own front page, is not one of the eleven. An older college profile describes 17 members with 7 doctorates and the remainder pursuing them. Treat the eleven as the people whose contact details you can actually get rather than as the size of the teaching body.

Research supervision is the genuinely large thing here. The college carries 92 full time and 78 part time doctoral students, and who finishes has flipped: 6 full time and 21 part time doctorates awarded in 2021-22, against 12 full time and 9 part time in 2023-24. None of it is grant funded. The same return enters zero sponsored projects across three years while spending Rs 3,32,75,860 on teaching and non teaching salaries in 2023-24, so a doctorate here runs on the state payroll and whatever fellowship the scholar brings.

The one professional outcome the college names for a graduate is a regulatory post rather than an industry one: a master's student in pharmaceutical analysis selected as Drug Inspector in the year 2013. Nothing resembling an alumni directory is published beyond that.

The address holds steady across every document that carries it, which is more than the college's name manages. The council filings give Acharya Nagarjuna University College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Nagarjuna Nagar, Guntur 522510, Andhra Pradesh; the department's current page adds the highway and prints NH16, Nagarjuna Nagar, Guntur, Andhra Pradesh 522510; the state counselling sheet books the institution's place as GUNTUR under the district code GTR. What the address does not tell you is that the pharmacy college is one tenant among several: the inspection format records the course as occupying an independent building on a multi institutional campus, with five acres of land against the pharmacy college. The block is the destination, not the university gate.

One telephone number reaches this college, and three documents a decade apart agree on it. 0863 2346459 is what the principal filed with the Pharmacy Council, what the contact directory on ANU's older site prints against the Principal, University College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and what the department's current page repeats in its own footer under Principal, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences.

The number printed across the top of that same current page belongs to another desk entirely. 0863-234 6118 is the line the university's directory lists against its Controller of Examinations, the office for a marks memo rather than for a seat, and dialling it with an admission question will cost you a transfer.

Email is the weak link in all of this. The address the college entered on both of its council filings is a personal Gmail account rather than an anu.ac.in one, so it travels with whoever held the principal's post when the form was signed. The institutional route recorded on the same form is the Registrar of Acharya Nagarjuna University, at Nagarjuna Nagar, Guntur 522510, who is also the examining authority for the degree. Use that for anything that has to outlast a change of principal.

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