Jamia Hamdard

Jamia Hamdard holds a distinction no other Indian institution can claim in 2025: the National Institutional Ranking Framework ranked its pharmacy teaching first in the country. It is a deemed-to-be university in South Delhi that grew out of the Unani system of medicine, and it runs pharmacy, allopathic medicine, Unani, nursing and a broad band of allied-health courses on a single campus. That specialisation is the thing to understand before you apply, because at Jamia Hamdard the qualifying exam, the annual fee and the likely first salary all depend on which of its schools you are aiming at, not on the university as a whole.

Jamia Hamdard is a private deemed-to-be university, a status the central government granted it in 1989. Its academic identity is older than that legal status. It was founded in 1963 as Hamdard Tibbi College by Hakim Abdul Hameed, and its roots reach back further still, to a Unani medicine clinic opened in Delhi in 1906 by Hakeem Hafiz Abdul Majeed. The word "Tibbi" in that original name is the key to the place: Tibb is the Unani-Arabic word for medicine, and health sciences remain the centre of gravity here.

The university carries a National Assessment and Accreditation Council grade of A+, and its national standing is uneven in a way that rewards a close look. It is only 74th on the broad Overall table, where it competes against the IITs and the largest central universities, yet it is the number-one pharmacy institution in the country and a top-50 name in medicine. For a student choosing a pharmacy, Unani or allied-health course, the specialist ranks matter far more than the overall one.

Fees at Jamia Hamdard are set school by school and published in full in its official Guide to Admissions, so the honest way to read them is by programme rather than by a single headline number. A general B.Pharm runs Rs 1,60,000 a year, a general BUMS in Unani medicine Rs 1,50,000, and the MBA in any discipline is the costliest flagship at Rs 2,60,000 a year.

Each row below gives the 2025-26 annual tuition for one flagship course per school, quoted for Indian students, so the spread across Jamia Hamdard's very different faculties is visible at a glance.

Two things sit on top of tuition and are easy to miss. First-year students pay a set of one-time charges: an admission fee of Rs 5,000, an enrolment fee of Rs 5,000, an alumni-fund contribution of Rs 3,000 and a refundable library deposit of Rs 5,000, and every year carries an examination and e-governance charge of Rs 10,000 at most schools, or Rs 3,000 at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. Several health-science courses also run a costlier self-financed version alongside the regular one: a self-financed B.Pharm is Rs 2,40,000 against Rs 1,60,000 for the general seat, and a self-financed BUMS is Rs 3,00,000 against Rs 1,50,000. Read the fee against the exact course code in the Guide to Admissions before you compare it with anywhere else.

MBBS is the one big exception the fee structure does not cover, because it is run by the university's separate medical college and priced separately. See the Admissions section for how that works.

There is no single Jamia Hamdard entrance exam, and the route splits along the same line the whole university does, between the regulated health degrees and everything else. The medical and Unani degrees are filled through national counselling on a common entrance rank, while pharmacy, science, engineering, management, law and the allied-health courses are filled through the university's own admission process, all detailed in its official Guide to Admissions.

MBBS is taught not by a department but by the Hamdard Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, the university's medical college and its attached Hakim Abdul Hameed Centenary Hospital. Because Jamia Hamdard is a deemed university, its MBBS seats are filled through NEET-UG and the central counselling that deemed universities join, and the medical college publishes its own fee and seat details. The BUMS course in Unani medicine also admits on a NEET-UG rank through the national AYUSH counselling process. For B.Pharm, D.Pharm and the science, engineering, management and law programmes, admission runs on the university's own merit and admission procedure rather than on NEET, so a pharmacy applicant should watch the university's admission portal rather than a medical counselling calendar.

A single "Jamia Hamdard cutoff" does not exist, and any page quoting one has invented it, because the university runs two admission systems that close on unrelated measures. Its MBBS and BUMS seats close on a NEET-UG rank that the national deemed-university and AYUSH counselling rounds settle, so the closing mark there is a counselling rank that resets every year with the category, the round and the size of the applicant pool. Every pharmacy, science, engineering, management and law seat closes instead on a course-specific Jamia Hamdard merit list, ranked on the marks or admission-test score its Guide to Admissions names for that programme.

So the figure to track is never a campus-wide one: it is the last position admitted to your own course and category in the latest cycle. For the health degrees that is a deemed-university NEET counselling rank; for a pharmacy or science seat it is the final position the school's own merit list reached. A B.Pharm applicant and an MBBS applicant on the same campus are watching two entirely different closing numbers.

Jamia Hamdard files its NIRF placement record split by how long each degree runs, and for a health-sciences university that is the only reading that means anything: a five-year clinical programme and a three-year B.Sc. never share a row. The five-year band, home to its longest health-science degrees, reported a median of Rs 7,80,000 for the batch that finished in 2023-24, with 285 of its 316 on-time graduates placed. The highest median on the whole return, Rs 9,35,000, belongs to the small three-year postgraduate group.

Every row below is taken straight from Jamia Hamdard's own 2025 data return to NIRF, for the latest graduating batch it has reported.

One pattern matters before salary is read as the whole story. The median rises with the length of the degree here, and the shorter courses feed graduate study as much as first jobs: 86 of the three-year undergraduates and 158 of the two-year postgraduates went on to more study in the reported year. Read the row that matches the course you want before you treat any one number as Jamia Hamdard's placement outcome.

The number of seats Jamia Hamdard is approved to fill is fixed course by course, and its NIRF filing collects those approvals by programme length. For 2023-24 the weight sits in two bands, the four-year undergraduate degrees at 905 seats and the two-year postgraduate courses at 881, while the research-heavy three-year postgraduate band is the smallest at 96; the full breakdown by level is below.

The per-course seat count, and the category-wise reservation inside it, is notified separately for each cycle in the Guide to Admissions and, for MBBS and BUMS, in the national counselling seat matrix. Those are the numbers to check against your own programme.

Jamia Hamdard's ranking profile is the clearest evidence of how specialised it is. It is 1st in the country in pharmacy in NIRF 2025 with a score of 86.59, and its medical college places it 40th in the medical table. Against the whole field it sits 47th among universities and 74th overall, with its management school ranked 87th. The gap between the pharmacy rank and the overall one is the single most useful fact for a prospective student: a general-purpose ranking hides exactly the strength that makes this university worth applying to.

The university is organised into schools, and the mix tells you plainly where its depth lies. The School of Pharmaceutical Education and Research is the flagship, backed by the School of Unani Medical Education and Research, which keeps the founding Tibbi tradition alive through BUMS and MD (Unani) programmes. Health sciences continue across the School of Chemical and Life Sciences and the School of Nursing Sciences and Allied Health, the last of which houses Rufaida College of Nursing and separate departments of physiotherapy, occupational therapy and paramedical sciences.

Around that health core sit the broader faculties: the School of Engineering Sciences and Technology, the School of Interdisciplinary Sciences and Technology, the School of Management and Business Studies, the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Hamdard Institute of Legal Studies and Research, and a Centre for Media and Mass Communication Studies. Allopathic medicine is taught separately again, at the Hamdard Institute of Medical Sciences and Research. If your field is a niche one, check which school it sits inside, because the fee and the admission route travel with the school, not with the university.

The campus is anchored by its health-science infrastructure, which is unusual for a university of this size. A Central Instrumentation Facility, first set up in the Faculty of Pharmacy, gives research students access to analytical equipment that a pharmacy-first institution leans on heavily, and the attached Hakim Abdul Hameed Centenary Hospital gives the medical and allied-health students a working teaching hospital rather than a borrowed one.

Beyond the laboratories and the hospital, the campus carries the usual academic support of a residential university: a central library, a convention centre and student amenities across a self-contained site in South Delhi. For the current state of any specific facility, the university's own website is the place to confirm it, since a campus of this kind adds and refurbishes buildings across cycles.

Jamia Hamdard is a partly residential university and provides separate hostel accommodation for men and women, which matters more here than at a purely local college because its health-science and postgraduate programmes draw students from across India. Places are limited relative to total enrolment, as at most universities, and are allotted on the university's own criteria rather than handed out automatically with admission.

Applicants from outside Delhi should confirm hostel availability, eligibility and the current charges for their category directly on the university's official site before planning the year, rather than assuming a seat comes with a room.

Where Jamia Hamdard's faculty strength shows most is in doctoral supervision and funded research. Its 2025 NIRF return records 496 full-time PhD scholars on its rolls and 110 sponsored research projects live in 2023-24, drawing funds from 15 separate agencies. That research base is concentrated in pharmacy and the life sciences, which is a large part of why the pharmacy school tops the national table rather than merely featuring on it.

For a prospective student the useful signal is that supervision capacity in the health sciences is deep here, so a research-minded pharmacy, Unani or life-science applicant is joining a faculty that is measurably active in its field rather than one that teaches from the syllabus alone.

Jamia Hamdard does not publish a single consolidated list of notable alumni, and we would rather point you to the source than repeat names we cannot stand behind. What can be said with confidence is where its graduates concentrate: its pharmacy and Unani schools have supplied faculty, researchers and drug-industry professionals across India for decades, a direct consequence of the university's specialisation. For named individuals, the university's own website and its school pages are the reliable source.

Jamia Hamdard runs its official notices through its main university website, where admission notifications, examination schedules and results are posted each cycle, while its medical college keeps separate updates on the HIMSR site. An applicant tracking a specific admission or exam date is better served by watching the matching official portal than a general news feed, because the health-science admissions in particular move on the national counselling calendar rather than the university's own.

The comparison prospective students most often make is with Jamia Millia Islamia, and the two are easier to tell apart than the shared word "Jamia" suggests. Jamia Millia Islamia is a central government university built around engineering, architecture, law and mass communication; Jamia Hamdard is a deemed-to-be university built around pharmacy, medicine, Unani and allied health. They share a city and half a name and almost nothing else in academic profile, so a student choosing between them is really choosing between two different fields, not two versions of the same one.

Within its own specialisation the more honest comparison is against the other top pharmacy schools in the country, where Jamia Hamdard's 1st place puts it at the head of the field rather than in the middle of it. The right way to compare it anywhere is programme against programme.

Jamia Hamdard's campus is in Hamdard Nagar, close to the Tughlaqabad institutional area in South Delhi, and its official website is jamiahamdard.ac.in. Its medical college, HIMSR, keeps its own site at himsr.ac.in. For admission queries, the Guide to Admissions and the university's admission portal are the authoritative contacts, and the addresses and phone numbers for individual schools are listed on the official site.

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