Chaudhary Charan Singh University, Meerut

A government-aided M.A. in a Chaudhary Charan Singh University department is billed Rs 3,655 for the year, of which tuition is Rs 180. On the same campus, the first year of B.Pharm is billed Rs 1,08,200. Neither seat asks for a CUET score: the university's 2026-27 rules fill most of its programmes, and most of those in its affiliated colleges, on qualifying-examination marks.

So the marks on a Class 12 or degree certificate, topped up by weightage, decide most seats. That rule reaches well beyond Meerut, because the colleges admitting through Chaudhary Charan Singh University (CCSU) are spread over six districts of western Uttar Pradesh, and the university itself entered the NIRF state university table for the first time in 2025, at 41st.

CCSU began life as Meerut University in 1965 and took its present name by law in 1994. The consolidated text of the Uttar Pradesh State Universities Act, 1973 lists Meerut among the "existing" universities, adds that it "shall from January 17, 1994 be called Chaudhary Charan Singh University, Meerut", and footnotes those words to U. P. Act no. 05 of 1994. Section 74 of the same Act repeals the Kanpur and Meerut Universities Act, 1965, so the 1973 Act, not the 1965 one, is the law CCSU runs under today.

The university's own campus information brochure for 2026-27 describes it as "formerly Meerut University", established in 1965 to meet the needs of higher education in western Uttar Pradesh, and cites the founding law as the U.P. Universities Act 1965. It records a golden jubilee in 2015, a campus of 222 acres with life-size statues of the late Prime Minister Ch. Charan Singh, after whom it is named, and Swami Vivekanand, and a claim to have been the first university in the country to introduce the M.Phil.

Campus Departments and Institutes

The brochure groups the campus into faculties of Agriculture, Arts, Commerce and Business Administration, Education, Law, Science, Engineering and Technology, and Pharmacy. Two units run like small colleges inside the campus. Sir Chhotu Ram Institute of Engineering and Technology (SCRIET), set up in 2002, teaches the B.Tech. in seven branches along with M.Tech., MCA, BBA and MBA programmes, and the Charak School of Pharmacy teaches B.Pharm and M.Pharm, per the 2026-27 brochure. The Institute of Legal Studies runs the law degrees.

Most campus seats are self-financed. The brochure's seat tables keep a short government-aided list, two agriculture master's subjects, nine M.A. subjects, eight M.Sc. subjects, the M.Ed. and three Russian language courses, against a self-financed list numbered past 70 programmes, from a Diploma in Indian Folk Art to seven B.Tech. branches.

The Affiliated Colleges

The 2026-27 admission portal lists 550 participating colleges, per the Samarth admission site. The university's 2025 list of affiliated colleges files them under six districts: Meerut, Ghaziabad, Baghpat, Gautam Buddh Nagar, Hapur and Bulandshahr. The schedule printed in the India Code copy of the 1973 Act gives a different set for CCSU: Bulandshahr, Meerut, Muzaffarnagar and Saharanpur.

Chaudhary Charan Singh's name is on many other institutions, and it tells an applicant nothing about affiliation. Chaudhary Charan Singh Haryana Agricultural University at Hisar, for instance, is a separate university in Haryana with no link to CCSU. Several colleges on the 2025 list do carry the name, among them the government college at Chhaprauli in Baghpat and B.Ed. colleges in Meerut and Gautam Buddh Nagar, but a college belongs to CCSU only if its row appears in that spreadsheet, with the course and affiliation dates beside it.

CCSU's fee sheets split along the aided and self-financed line, and the gap between the two is wide. The campus brochure prices a government-aided M.A. at Rs 3,655 a year and an aided M.Sc. or M.Sc. (Ag.) at Rs 4,655, the difference being a Rs 1,000 laboratory fee. Both totals include Rs 1,500 of refundable lab and library security, and the examination fee is charged separately each semester.

The self-financed undergraduate table carries the heading "Annual Fee Structure of Campus and Colleges", so these rates are meant to apply at the affiliated colleges that run the same courses too.

The four-year NEP honours degrees in single subjects are billed by semester instead. A B.A. (Hons.) in Economics, History, Political Science, Psychology or Sociology costs Rs 16,335 in the first semester and Rs 13,925 in later odd semesters, English, Hindi, Sanskrit and Urdu cost Rs 14,135 to start, and every B.Sc. (Hons.) subject costs Rs 20,085 for the first semester, according to the brochure.

Master's, ITEP and Doctoral Fees

Even the cheapest self-financed master's, such as the M.A. in Geography, costs more than three times an aided M.A., and the laboratory and professional programmes cost many times more again.

A Ph.D. scholar in a practical subject pays Rs 7,105 in the first year and Rs 5,215 after that, and one in a non-practical subject Rs 4,955 and then Rs 3,565, with Rs 11000 due at thesis submission, per the same brochure. For ITEP, the dual-degree route into school teaching, the bill is Rs. 37500.00 of tuition each year on top of a Rs 500 counselling fee, according to its 2026-27 information brochure.

Two warnings sit in the fee pages. Any self-financed course that attracts applications for less than 60% of its approved seats is discontinued for the session, and several programmes, among them the MFA in Fashion Designing and the PG Diploma in Tourism and Hoteliering, are already marked "Suspended". Fees are also not refunded or transferred once paid.

CCSU has no university-wide entrance test for most degrees. Its 2026-27 rules name only four programmes that go through a written university test, the M.Ed., LL.M., B.P.Ed. and M.P.Ed., and state that for "Masters, Bachelors, Diploma and Certificate programmes, the admissions shall be made on the basis of Merit for both, the University Campus and the affiliated colleges", in the words of the campus brochure. The word CUET does not appear in that brochure, in the entrance rules or in the ITEP brochure.

Merit Seats Through the Samarth Portal

One registration covers the campus and the colleges. The university's catalogue for affiliated colleges shows the sequence: each college downloads its applicant data, sends offer letters to students who make its merit, and the student accepts one college's offer online with an OTP before verifying documents and paying the fee at that college.

The college brochure for 2026-27, written mostly in Hindi, sets the limits. An applicant can choose up to three courses or colleges, candidates from other states can take no more than 25 per cent of UG and PG seats (the cap does not apply to professional courses), and up to 50 per cent of seats in an undergraduate class without an entrance test can go to students who passed Class 12 outside the UP Board, provided their marks are no lower than UP Board candidates of the same category. The same brochure sets a normal ceiling of 60 students per undergraduate section.

The minimum marks are low for the general degrees. A college B.A., B.Com. or B.Sc. needs 33% in Class 12, while a B.Com. (Hons.) needs 65% (60% for SC and ST), per the college brochure. For PG admission, the campus brochure takes a flat 5% off the merit index of anyone applying in a subject they did not study as a main subject at UG level.

This year's merit rounds ran long. The portal's public notices show a first merit schedule in early August, second and third merit schedules on 19 Aug 2026 and 25 Aug 2026, a registration reopening from 02 Sept to 06 Sept 2026, a fourth merit on 07 Sep 2026, a remaining-merit schedule posted on 11 Sep 2026 and a sports-quota admission window from 14 Sept to 16 Sept 2026.

Weightage That Moves a Merit Index

Weightage points are added straight onto the qualifying percentage, so four points of weightage lift a merit index exactly as far as four extra percentage points of marks would. Under the brochure's weightage rules for M.A., M.Sc., M.Sc. (Ag.) and LL.M., a CCSU graduate gets four percent, as does a candidate with national, state or inter-university sports participation, an honours degree in the subject is worth two percent, and an NCC C certificate three. The total is capped at eight, or 12 for children and spouses of employees of the university and its affiliated colleges. Undergraduate applicants can also claim marks for scouting and ranger or rover awards, from one mark up to four for an award from the President of India.

Seats are reserved at 21% for SC, 2% for ST and 27% for OBC candidates, with 20% of seats set aside horizontally for girls and EWS seats added under state guidelines, per the campus brochure.

The Four Entrance Programmes

The entrance rules opened forms from 19.05.2026 to 19.06.2026 at Rs. 700 for General and OBC candidates and Rs. 500 for SC and ST. The M.Ed. paper has 250 objective questions in three hours (100 on mental ability, 100 on B.Ed. subject competence and 50 on Hindi or English), and merit is built on the entrance score alone, with 45% needed in the test. The LL.M. paper has 100 questions, ten from each of ten law subjects from Jurisprudence to Company Law. None of the papers carries negative marking, and ties go to the higher qualifying marks and then to the older candidate.

The rules had proposed a test in the first week of July 2026. The tests were actually held in the second half of August, and a Dean of Students' Welfare press note in early September told candidates that the results were out on the university website and the entrance portal.

For the general B.A., B.Sc., B.Com. and M.A. seats there is no closing mark to look up, by design. The college brochure says the university will prepare no centralised merit list in 2026-27, leaving merit and waiting lists to each campus department and college, and the fourth-merit schedule of 07.09.2026 tells them not to upload that list to the portal but to send offers straight to applicants. An applicant sees only an offer, or none, on the Samarth dashboard. The campus law programmes are the exception: the Institute of Legal Studies publishes full merit lists, category by category, with every candidate's merit index.

In the three-year LL.B. lists, the merit index is the graduation percentage, or the postgraduate percentage where that is higher, plus weightage. The lowest index on each list, leaving out candidates admitted under the disability category, fell with each round.

The five-year B.A. LL.B. ranks on the Class 12 percentage, calculated on 500 marks, plus any weightage, and closes much higher.

Disability-category names sit below the main run on several lists, at indexes far lower than the table: 61.4 and 54.13 in the unreserved block of the first LL.B. list, and 62.8 in the same block of the opening five-year law list. Each list is open for admission on two or three days only, and a candidate named on it who does not report in that window loses the claim.

ITEP shows the opposite problem, too few takers. After a third provisional merit list in July, the Department of Education's first open merit list of 31 July still reported vacancies of UR-16, OBC-8, SC-9, ST-1 and EWS-4 in the B.A. B.Ed., and UR-14, OBC-9, SC-10, ST-1 and EWS-4 in the B.Sc. B.Ed. Each of those programmes has 50 campus seats, per the ITEP brochure. A second open merit list followed on 12.08.2026, so the campus ITEP was still admitting well into August.

Every row below is taken from what CCSU filed with the ranking body for 2025, its return IR-O-U-0506, so a graduate of an affiliated college is not counted anywhere in it.

The four-year stream, which includes the B.Tech., places about two in three of its graduates. The two-year master's stream does not: in the same return, 269 of 679 were placed in 2021-22, 452 of 1,080 in 2022-23 and 314 of 922 in 2023-24, while higher studies took 543 of the latest batch.

Read the medians with care. The master's median for 2021-22 is entered in the NIRF return as 410000, but the amount in words beside it reads "Forty One thousand", and the return explains neither that entry nor the rise to Rs 7,00,000 two batches later. It gives no breakdown by programme, so MBA, MCA and M.A. graduates sit in the same row.

A second official count does not line up with the first. CCSU's quality assurance report to NAAC, the AQAR for 2023-24, puts placements at 787 and entries to higher education at just 94 for that year, and neither figure matches the placed or higher-studies columns of the NIRF table above. What neither return records is the name of any employer or the top salary on offer. The campus brochure describes a Placement Cell and a state employment bureau on campus, and only its departmental write-ups name employers: the Chemistry department, for one, says its polymer science M.Sc. graduates have joined firms such as NilKamal, Asian Paints, Reliance and IOCL, with no count or year attached.

Sanctioned seats for 2023-24 add up by stream as follows in CCSU's ranking return: two-year PG 1024, three-year UG 470, four-year UG 420, five-year UG 60 and three-year PG 20. The campus brochure gives the programme-level seats.

In the campus seat tables, each single-subject honours programme is listed at 27+3 seats, doubled to 54+6 for History and Chemistry. The ITEP adds 50 B.A. B.Ed. and 50 B.Sc. B.Ed. seats on campus, with further ITEP seats at colleges in Ghaziabad, Dadri and Baghpat, per the ITEP brochure.

Applications run well ahead of places. The AQAR 2023-24 records 19676 eligible applications across all programmes in that year, 1723 seats earmarked for reserved categories and 6537 students on the roll. Its master's classrooms draw noticeably from other states: 451 of the 2013 two-year PG students on the NIRF roll are from outside Uttar Pradesh, though not one is a foreign national. The four-year UG stream is the only one where men far outnumber women, 873 to 232.

Of the parameters NIRF weighs, CCSU's added up to 52.09 in the 2025 table for state-run public universities, which was enough for 41st. Measured against all universities rather than state ones, CCSU gets no individual number, only a place among those listed in the 151-200 group for 2025.

The previous year's state university list did not include CCSU at all, so 41 is a debut rather than a slide or a climb. It was already in the 151-200 band of the 2024 University ranking.

Perception is the parameter that stands out. In the same table, CCSU's 52.66 beats the 46.05 of the University of Lucknow, which placed 27th, and research, at 27.95, is CCSU's weakest score. Among Uttar Pradesh universities in that category, Madan Mohan Malaviya University of Technology at 23rd, Lucknow at 27th and King George's Medical University at 29th all finished above it.

The university library has 167199 books, 32347 bound volumes of journals and 15024 theses, and opens from 8 A.M. to 10 P.M. on working days, according to the campus brochure. Students and faculty of affiliated colleges can join it too, and it keeps a Braille section.

A Central Instrumentation Facility set up in 2021 houses the costlier research instruments and is open to affiliated colleges, with Rs. 500 lakhs sanctioned to upgrade it, per the brochure. Sport is laid out for competition: a 400m cinder track, two hockey fields, a wrestling hall with a standard mat and a synthetic badminton court. The Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Auditorium seats more than 1000.

The AQAR 2023-24 counts 164 classrooms, 85 laboratories and 988 working computers for students. Laboratory buying jumped in 2022-23 and stayed there: Rs 2,76,39,243 in 2021-22, Rs 13,16,91,905 the next year and Rs 13,28,92,645 in 2023-24, going by CCSU's ranking data.

Hostel

The brochure lists eight hostels, six for men and two for women (Durga Bhabhi and Rani Laxmi Bai), and the AQAR adds a sports hostel and puts total capacity at approximately 2000 students. Rooms go only to full-time campus students, never to diploma or certificate students, and are allotted against vacancies under UP reservation rules; residents must vacate for at least 15 days each summer for repairs, per the campus brochure.

The fee notes print just two hostel amounts, a refundable Rs. 2000 hostel security and another Rs. 2000 mess security. For room rent and mess charges, which the brochure leaves out, the warden of the hostel you are allotted, or the Chief Warden, is the person to ask.

Teaching numbers depend on which return you read. CCSU told NAAC in its AQAR 2023-24 that it had 228 full-time teachers on 246 sanctioned posts, 180 holding a doctorate or higher, yet 299 names went into its NIRF 2025 filing.

Doctoral output has grown fast. The NIRF return counts 398 full-time Ph.D. scholars and 182 Ph.D. graduates in 2023-24, up from 65 in 2021-22. The grant money now arrives in bigger, rarer cheques: Rs 72,75,000 was spread over 28 sponsored projects in 2021-22, but Rs 3,55,80,060 came from only 13 in 2023-24, according to the same return. Consultancy earned Rs 2,68,14,267 from 17 clients in 2023-24, against Rs 5,74,299 the year before, per the NIRF data, which gives no reason for the swing.

The brochure names DST-FIST support for Genetics and Plant Breeding and for Physics, UGC-SAP-DRS support for Genetics and Plant Breeding, and UP Government Centre of Excellence status for Hindi, Sociology, Botany and Zoology.

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