Banaras Hindu University, Banaras

A four-year B.A. (Hons) at the Faculty of Arts in Varanasi is charged at Rs 1,150 a semester. The same degree at Arya Mahila Post Graduate College, one of the four colleges admitted to the privileges of Banaras Hindu University, is charged at Rs 12,100 a year with a further Rs 800 where the subject carries a practical, per the BHU UG Information Bulletin 2026. Both are BHU seats, both are allotted off the same CUET score, and which one your allotment letter names decides what four years cost you.

Banaras Hindu University was founded in 1916 by Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya and teaches inside a walled estate of 550 hectares, or 1,300 acres, in Varanasi. It is a central university, and its own PG Information Bulletin 2026 counts 5 institutes, 16 faculties, 136 departments and the Mahila Mahavidyalaya inside that wall, with over 38,000 students on the rolls. A second campus, Rajiv Gandhi South Campus at Barkachha in Mirzapur district, adds 1,092.6 hectares, or 2,700 acres, about 75 km away.

One thing to settle before anything else. The Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) stands inside the same boundary wall, admits on JEE Advanced through JoSAA, sets its own fees and is ranked on its own returns. Nothing below describes it.

BHU prices the same classroom three different ways, and that is the first thing to understand about its fee sheet. Most departments carry a regular seat, a supernumerary paid seat and, in some programmes, a special-fee seat. The teaching is identical; the charge is not. A seat in M.A. English at the Department of English costs Rs 1,500 a semester as a regular seat and Rs 6,500 a semester as a paid one.

The undergraduate sheet runs like this on the main campus.

Read the unit carefully. Every figure above is per semester unless it says otherwise, and that convention flips at the four colleges admitted to the university's privileges, where the bulletin prints an annual figure instead: B.A. (Hons) is Rs 5,100 a year at Vasanta College for Women, Rs 10,600 at Vasant Kanya Mahavidyalaya, Rs 10,950 at DAV Post Graduate College and Rs 12,100 at Arya Mahila Post Graduate College, each with a small practical surcharge on top.

Postgraduate charges move over a much wider band, from a token departmental fee to a professional-school figure.

The gap between a regular seat in the Master of Computer Application at Rs 2,000 a semester and a paid seat in the same programme at Rs 67,000 is the sharpest in the bulletin, and it is worth checking which of the two your allotment names before you accept it.

Undergraduate entry runs on CUET (UG) and then on BHU's own Combined Allotment Programme, which the university abbreviates to CAP UG. The CUET papers are fixed per programme rather than per faculty: B.Com (Hons) is filled from Accountancy, Business Studies and the General Aptitude Test, while B.A. (Hons) takes a language paper in English or Hindi plus the General Aptitude Test, and B.Sc. (Hons) for the biology stream takes Physics, Chemistry and Biology. Age caps bite: most B.A., B.Com and B.Sc. seats are closed above 22 years on 1 July 2026, B.Sc. Agriculture runs from 16 to 25, and Medical Technology stops at 23.

Postgraduate entry is CUET (PG) followed by CAP PG, and the bulletin makes appearing in CUET-PG compulsory even for candidates applying under a supernumerary quota. A handful of programmes add a stage: the MBA in Agribusiness and the MBAs in Financial Management, Foreign Trade and Risk and Insurance are decided on a composite of the CUET score with a group discussion and interview that together carry 20 per cent of the written weight.

Two structural rules shape who competes with whom, and neither appears on aggregator pages. First, institutional preference: up to 25 per cent of open-category seats are held for candidates who took their qualifying degree at BHU itself, following a Supreme Court directive, with MCA and the special courses excluded. The definition is narrower than it sounds and it catches people out: you count as a BHU student only if you passed that qualifying examination at BHU in 2026 or in the year immediately before it. Second, the supernumerary layer sits on top of the sanctioned seats rather than inside them, at 15 per cent for wards of university employees, up to 15 per cent as paid seats, and 15 per cent for foreign nationals, who are exempted from CUET-PG and admitted on merit alone.

Reservation follows Government of India rules, and the bulletin sets them out programme by programme: 15 per cent for Scheduled Castes, 7.5 per cent for Scheduled Tribes, 27 per cent for Other Backward Classes outside the creamy layer, 10 per cent for Economically Weaker Sections with family income below Rs 8 lakh, and 5 per cent for persons with benchmark disability.

MBBS and BDS sit outside all of this. The UG bulletin's programme list runs from B.A. (Hons) to the two B.Sc. Medical Technology degrees at the Institute of Medical Sciences, and the medical and dental degrees themselves are not on it, because those seats are filled from NEET merit through the national and state counselling rounds rather than through CAP.

Asking for "the BHU cutoff" is asking the wrong question. The university runs a round-wise cutoff tool for the 2026 undergraduate cycle, and the way that tool is built tells you why a single number cannot exist.

It filters on three things only: the admission round, the programme, and the department or faculty. That last filter is doing more work than it looks. It lists each teaching location separately, so the Faculty of Arts, Mahila Mahavidyalaya, Rajiv Gandhi South Campus and the four city colleges each appear on their own, and it lists most of them twice, once plainly and once as a "(Paid Fee Course)" entry. The regular seat and the paid seat in one department are two different competitions with two different closing scores. The round filter adds another layer, running Regular Round-1 through Regular Round-4 and then Spot Round 1 and Spot Round 2, with separate rounds again for the BFA and BPA programmes, and scores drift down as vacancies appear late.

Two more splits sit in the bulletins rather than the tool. Seats are allotted category by category, so unreserved, OBC, SC, ST, EWS and PwBD each close at their own mark. And at postgraduate level the seat tables divide every programme between BHU's own graduates and candidates from elsewhere, which gives one programme two unreserved closing scores rather than one.

A screenshot of "the BHU cutoff" is therefore close to meaningless unless it names the round, the programme, the exact department entry including whether it is the paid one, and the category. Look up that combination yourself for the cycle you are applying in.

At undergraduate level BHU is a route to further study, not to a campus offer, and its own ranking return says so plainly. Of the 4,876 students who finished a three-year undergraduate degree in 2023-24, 4,301 went on to higher studies and 510 were placed. Read that ratio before you read any median.

The three-year postgraduate band inverts the pattern completely, because it is largely clinical: 244 of its 283 graduates were placed at a median of Rs 13,50,000. The Institute of Medical Sciences reports its own slice separately, and of 142 MD and MS graduates in 2023-24, 110 were placed at a median of Rs 22,00,000, the highest figure BHU files anywhere.

Agriculture and dentistry sit at the other end. The four-year agricultural undergraduate cohort of 189 saw 29 placed at a median of Rs 5,00,000, with 155 continuing to a master's, and the dental cohort of 47 saw 20 placed at a median of Rs 9,60,000. A single university-wide placement percentage would hide all of that.

Sanctioned intake for 2023-24, as filed with the ranking framework, gives the size of each competition.

The professional schools publish their own numbers, and they are small. MBBS intake at the Institute of Medical Sciences has held at 100 seats a year, with 188 sanctioned MD and MS places; the Faculty of Dental Sciences carries 63 BDS seats and 24 MDS seats; the Institute of Agricultural Sciences carries 204 seats in its four-year degree and 60 in the five-year one.

At programme level the bulletins print the split you actually compete in. B.Com (Hons) has 286 regular seats and 43 paid seats at the Faculty of Commerce, with 227 at DAV Post Graduate College, 100 at Vasant Kanya Mahavidyalaya and 96 each at Arya Mahila Post Graduate College and Vasanta College for Women. B.Sc. (Hons) Agriculture has 154 regular and 23 paid seats on the main campus and 50 special-fee seats at the south campus.

Postgraduate tables carry the institutional-preference split openly. M.A. English at the Department of English lists 10 unreserved seats for BHU's own graduates against 29 for candidates from elsewhere, with 14 more held for employee wards. Where you took your bachelor's degree changes the pool you are ranked in.

BHU is ranked in eight separate tables of the government's 2025 exercise, which very few Indian universities manage, and the spread across them is wide enough to matter.

Fourth in agriculture and sixtieth in management are the same university, filed in the same year. If you are choosing between BHU and a peer, the discipline row is the one that carries information about your degree; the University rank of 6 tells you about the institution you will be enrolled in and very little about the department you will sit in.

The department list is the widest thing about BHU. Inside its 16 faculties sit the Faculty of Arts with its long roll of language and humanities departments, the Faculty of Science, Commerce, Law, Social Sciences, Education, Performing Arts, Visual Arts and the Sanskrit Vidya Dharma Vijnana faculty, which awards Shastri and Acharya degrees in Vedanta, Mimansa, Nyaya-Vaisheshika, Jyotish, Dharmashastra, Jain Darshan and Bauddha Darshan, subjects most Indian universities no longer teach as full degrees.

The Institute of Medical Sciences is a university in miniature. It runs four faculties, with 35 departments in medicine and 17 in Ayurveda, alongside the Faculty of Dental Sciences and the College of Nursing. The Institute of Agricultural Sciences carries agronomy, horticulture, dairy and food technology, farm engineering and extension education, with more of the same at the south campus.

The hospital estate is what separates BHU's infrastructure from a conventional university campus. The Institute of Medical Sciences runs constituent hospitals with 2,614 beds in total: 1,385 in Sir Sunderlal Hospital, 430 in the Centenary Super-Specialty Block, 334 in the Trauma Centre, 180 in the Ayurveda Wing, 100 each in the Mother and Child Health Wing and the Regional Institute of Ophthalmology, 60 in the Centre of Excellence for Mental Health, 13 in the Faculty of Dental Sciences and 12 in the Bone Marrow Transplant and Stem Cell Research Centre. The Trauma Centre alone keeps a 128-slice CT scanner, a 1.5 Tesla MRI, a blood bank and a 225-seat auditorium, and runs emergency services around the clock.

The rest of the estate is residential in character. The campus holds the white marble Shri Vishwanath Temple at its centre, along with 1,667 staff quarters and 5 guesthouses, and teaching that begins at nursery level and ends at post-doctoral research inside one perimeter.

Two entries in the 2025 ranking return matter to anyone who will live on the estate. Lifts or ramps and specially designed toilets reach more than 80 per cent of BHU's buildings, and the same return logs a ban on single-use plastic items, rooftop and surface-runoff rainwater harvesting backed by recharge wells, and solar panels.

The postgraduate bulletin describes BHU as the largest residential university in Asia, with 72 hostels and nearly 11,000 inmates. Treat that as the university's own shorthand rather than a bed count, because the undergraduate bulletin lists the estate hostel by hostel and its own printed intake totals run higher than that. Publishing the estate at that granularity is unusual for an Indian university, and it is the part worth using.

The bulletin is equally direct about the catch. A hostel seat is not guaranteed to anyone, demand runs well past supply, and allotment follows a merit-cum-distance formula, so a strong score and a home address far from Varanasi both help. Budget for private accommodation as the fallback rather than as the exception.

The 2025 return entered 1,907 faculty members, and the research population under them is what an applicant should actually weigh: 2,225 full-time and 88 part-time doctoral scholars, with 638 full-time doctorates awarded in 2023-24 alone. Those scholars run laboratories, mark practicals and supervise projects, and their number varies sharply by faculty: the Institute of Medical Sciences carries 120 full-time doctoral students of its own and the Institute of Agricultural Sciences 238.

Funded work sits behind that. The university reported 598 sponsored projects drawn from 87 funding agencies in 2023-24, alongside 184 consultancy projects for 1,215 client organisations. Ask a department how many of those live projects are its own before you judge its research depth from the university total.

BHU does not publish an alumni roll in its admission bulletins, so the honest version of this section is narrower than the lists circulating elsewhere. What the university does print is a set of four Bharat Ratna awardees it names as associated with the institution: Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, Dr S. Radhakrishnan, Bhupen Hazarika and Prof. C.N.R. Rao. Association is not the same as graduation, and the bulletin does not claim it is: Radhakrishnan appears in the same document as a former vice-chancellor of the university, as does Acharya Narendra Dev.

For a verified list of graduates in your own department, the departmental pages and the university's alumni office are the place to check rather than a compiled internet list.

We do not run a news feed for this university. Dated announcements matter here more than at most institutions, because reporting schedules, vacant-seat lists and spot-round notifications are published only during the cycle and withdrawn afterwards, so the official admission portal is where any date-sensitive item should be read. The university publishes its own activity reports and research announcements through its news pages.

The most useful comparison for BHU is with itself. The same B.Com (Hons) degree can be taken at the Faculty of Commerce for Rs 1,150 a semester or at DAV Post Graduate College for an annual fee several times that, and the closing scores at the two are not the same either. Before comparing BHU with another university, settle which location inside BHU you are actually being offered.

Against other central universities, two features distinguish it. One is the institutional-preference quota, which materially favours its own graduates at postgraduate level. The other is a breadth that stretches from Ayurveda and Sanskrit through agriculture to a 2,614-bed hospital system. What it does not offer is a strong management school by national standing, so an applicant whose target is an MBA should weigh that rank against the specialist business schools rather than against BHU's university placing.

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