Iftm University, Moradabad

IFTM University Moradabad made the NIRF pharmacy table in 2025, at 93rd place, having been absent from every pharmacy list published from 2017 to 2024. The pharmacy teaching behind that rank is older than the university itself: its School of Pharmaceutical Sciences began B.Pharm teaching in 1999, eleven years before Uttar Pradesh gave the institute university status. Today the campus on Delhi Road runs pharmacy through three separately approved units, each under its own Pharmacy Council of India code.

IFTM began in 1996 as the Institute of Foreign Trade and Management with three courses, and the university's research journal still tells that story on its About page. The full form survives on paper more than in daily use. The University Grants Commission's 2011 notification letter is addressed to the "Institute of Foreign Trade Management University", and the managing society named in the pharmacy units' Pharmacy Council filings is still the Institute of Foreign Trade and Management Society.

University status came through a state law. The approvals page records that IFTM University was set up by an Act (No. 24 of 2010) of the Uttar Pradesh legislature as a State Private University, able to award degrees under section 22 of the UGC Act, 1956. The UGC notification letter of February 2011 cites the state notification of October 2010 and bars the university from opening off-campus centres outside Uttar Pradesh or taking affiliated colleges. When a UGC expert committee inspected the campus in September 2014, its report gave the university's date of establishment as 11 January 2011, a few months after the notification.

The university's 2023 Self Study Report to NAAC traces the institution to its founder, the late Shri Onkar Saran Kothiwal, and puts the campus at 67.17 acres on NH-24. The About page places it 12 km from Moradabad city on the Lucknow-Delhi highway.

B.Pharm and D.Pharm carry the highest annual tuition anywhere in IFTM's 2026-27 fee tables, and the two-year diploma is billed at exactly the same yearly rate as the four-year degree. The university's UG fee table lists B.Pharm at 125000 a year of tuition plus 10000 for exams, and its diploma table prices D.Pharm at the very same 125000 and 10000. For comparison, the same UG table prices a B.Tech in civil engineering at 92000.

The same footnote sits under every one of those tables. A one-time processing charge is Rs. 5,000, hostel with food is Rs. 45,000 a year, and the bus is marked free, along with summer and winter uniforms. The fee and payment page says tuition and exam fee are paid in two equal instalments a year for programmes of two years or longer, by draft or pay order in favour of IFTM University, and warns that a student who misses the deadline may be asked to leave the programme without a refund.

The university's published merit scholarship does not reduce any of these pharmacy fees; the Scholarships section below explains why.

Applying to IFTM pharmacy is a direct application to the university. The How to Apply page describes three steps: pick a programme you are eligible for, register, then submit the application form with class X marksheet, Aadhaar copy and the registration fee receipt, either on paper to the Admission Cell or through online registration. The admission pages name no Uttar Pradesh state counselling round and no university entrance test for pharmacy; the only entrance test flagged on the home page is the Ph.D. entrance.

CUET is in the picture for the degree. The National Testing Agency's CUET (UG) 2026 mapping for IFTM University maps its Bachelor of Pharmacy to Physics, Chemistry and English plus one of Biology, Biotechnology, Biochemistry or Mathematics, and its eligibility column makes English a compulsory 10+2 subject. That English condition does not appear on the university's own UG fee table, so check it against your marksheet before applying. The mapping shows the programme is open to CUET candidates; neither document says a CUET score is compulsory.

For M.Pharm, a valid GPAT score is printed as an alternative to 55% in B.Pharm on the PG table, so a graduate below that mark has a second way in. The SSR says the university follows Uttar Pradesh government reservation guidelines in its admissions and reports a demand ratio of 1:11.5 over five years, counted across all programmes rather than for pharmacy alone.

IFTM does not publish a cutoff for B.Pharm, D.Pharm or M.Pharm, and with no ranked state counselling list feeding its pharmacy seats there are no opening or closing ranks to report. The bar a pharmacy applicant has to clear is the one printed in the fee tables: the 10+2 subject combination for D.Pharm and B.Pharm, and 55% in B.Pharm or a valid GPAT score for M.Pharm.

Demand is the more useful signal. In the university's NIRF 2025 return, the B.Pharm first year admitted 100 students against 100 sanctioned seats in each of 2018-19, 2019-20 and 2020-21, while the M.Pharm intake of 48 was short once, with 44 admitted in 2021-22.

The only placement figures IFTM has filed with a national body for pharmacy are in its NIRF 2025 data submission, and they show a B.Pharm record that went from nothing to a sizeable median in two years. The B.Pharm class that graduated in 2021-22 recorded 0 placements.

Read the 2023-24 B.Pharm row with its denominator in view. The median of 600000 describes the 46 graduates who were placed, not the 101 who finished; 21 more went on to further study, which leaves roughly a third of that batch with no recorded outcome. The master's batch of that year converts far better, with 39 of 48 placed.

Recruiter names come only from the university. The School of Pharmaceutical Sciences page lists Sunpharma, Novartis, Torrent and Lupin among past employers without dates or counts. The university's placement-statistics pages stop at 2021-22, and the page for that year is empty.

IFTM's pharmacy seats are split across three Pharmacy Council of India registrations on the same campus, which is why the pharmacy total is well above the 100 first-year B.Pharm seats in the university's NIRF return. The School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, registered as PCI-1945, and Pharmacy Academy, registered as PCI-1570, each carry a B.Pharm and a D.Pharm, and only the School carries M.Pharm. Sahu Onkar Saran School of Pharmacy, registered as PCI-5516, is the newest, established in 2022.

Every sanctioned seat in B.Pharm, D.Pharm and all four M.Pharm branches was taken in each of 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23, according to the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences filing. The council's decision letters for 2024-2025, posted by IFTM under its approvals page, extend the School's and the Academy's intakes unchanged and let the Sahu Onkar Saran school lift B.Pharm admissions to the figure in the table. No category-wise break-up of these seats is published.

IFTM's 2025 NIRF listing is in Pharmacy alone: rank 93 with a score of 42.40, directly behind a Pune institution on 42.58 in the 2025 pharmacy table. It does not appear in the 2024, 2023, 2022 or earlier pharmacy tables back to 2017.

Teaching resources carry the score, and perception drags it down. A perception mark of 7.47 means the academics and employers NIRF surveys barely registered the university's pharmacy teaching, so the rank rests on what IFTM reported about its own staff, spending and students. The research side is thin but growing: the data submission records 5 sponsored projects bringing in Rs 3500000 in 2023-24, against a single project the year before.

Pharmacy sits in the university's Faculty of Pharmacy, with the three units listed in the Seat Matrix above. The School of Pharmaceutical Sciences is the postgraduate and research unit and the only one of the three with M.Pharm branches; when the UGC committee visited in 2014, its report listed a single M.Pharm, in Pharmaceutics, whereas the School's later PCI filing carries four branches. Outside pharmacy, the university lists schools of Business Management, Computer Science and Applications, Engineering and Technology, Biotechnology, Agricultural Sciences and Engineering, Sciences, Law, and Education and Humanities, plus a University Polytechnic.

Laboratory space is where the pharmacy units are best documented: five labs each for pharmaceutics and pharmacology, six for pharmaceutical chemistry, three for pharmacognosy and one for pharmacy practice, according to the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences filing. The same filing records an animal house of 218 square metres for postgraduate work, a herbal garden and a 260-seat auditorium. The Pharmacy Academy page names FTIR, HPLC, UV spectrophotometer, PCR and rheometer among its instruments.

Spending on pharmacy labs jumped in the latest year. The NIRF submission shows Rs 5132563 on new laboratory equipment in 2023-24, against Rs 671403 in 2022-23, and Rs 3054256 on the library. Equipment had been the soft spot a decade earlier: the 2014 UGC committee accepted that the pharmacy labs met PCI requirements but wrote that upkeep and usage needed improvement.

Across the campus, the salient features page lists two auditoriums of 500 and 200 seats, a dispensary with an ambulance, three nationalised banks with ATMs, a post office and NCC units for boys and girls. The SSR says the central library runs on KOHA software with a 1.4 GBPS connection.

IFTM has three boys' hostels and one girls' hostel on campus, for 600 boys and 400 girls. Rooms come with cupboards, study furniture and Wi-Fi, and there is a weekly laundry service. The rules are strict: hostellers must be in by 10 pm, girls by 7 pm, may not eat dinner outside, and cannot leave mid-session with a refund. The fee tables put hostel with meals at Rs. 45,000 a year.

The pharmacy NIRF return lists 48 faculty members and reports 403 B.Pharm and 96 M.Pharm students across all years. The three units' PCI filings name their heads as Sushil Kumar at the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Prof. Navneet Verma at Pharmacy Academy and Dr Arun Kumar Mishra at Sahu Onkar Saran School of Pharmacy. Those filings were prepared for the 2023-24 approval cycle, and the Sahu Onkar Saran one was printed in May 2024, so a head named there may since have changed.

Every pharmacy doctoral candidate IFTM reported to NIRF is enrolled part-time. Its return counts 136 of them against a full-time roll of zero, and the Ph.D. degrees completed rose from none in 2021-22 to 10 and then 13 over the next two years.

The IFTM University Alumni Association microsite runs an Alumni Speaks section and messages from the university to former students, but it gives no roll of distinguished pharmacy graduates, and this page names none.

The campus is at Lodhipur Rajput on the Delhi Road side of Moradabad, off NH-24.

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