Maharaja Sayajirao University Of Baroda, Vadodara

MSU Baroda admission is not one queue, and neither is its price list. The university's own student portal carries 209 programmes, a separate list of 43 engineering, architecture and pharmacy programmes is filled by the state's professional-courses committee, MBBS is decided by a medical committee against NEET ranks, and doctoral entry runs on the university's own PhD portal. The fee follows the door. Portal programmes are priced by the university itself, course page by course page, with a lower figure quoted for girls than for boys, and the professional seats are priced by outside authorities at a small fraction of what this university charges on its own higher-payment degrees.

The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda is a state public university in Vadodara, Gujarat, and it is two institutions stacked on one another. The older is Baroda College, founded in 1881 by Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III, with the Kala Bhavan added in 1909. The younger is the university itself: the Government of Baroda decided to create a residential university by its order No. (R) 169-39 dated 21st February 1949, the enabling bill received the assent of Maharaja Pratapsinhrao Gaekwad on April 29, 1949, and the university came into existence on April 30, 1949. The homepage credits Pratapsinhrao with settling the Sir Sayajirao Diamond Jubilee and Memorial Trust, which still funds educational work across the territory of the former princely state.

That inheritance is visible from the road. The main building that now houses the Faculty of Arts was designed by Robert Fellowes Chisholm in the Indo-Saracenic style, and the dome over its convocation hall was modelled on the great dome of the Gol Gumbaz at Bijapur.

The taught programmes are split across two published lists, and which list a course sits on decides who prices it. The larger one runs on the university's own portal: 209 programmes reaching from the Sanskrit mahavidyalaya's shastri degrees through arts, science, commerce, law, fine arts, performing arts, social work, education, journalism, family and community sciences and technology to the MBA and the MCA. The smaller one holds the courses a state committee counsels into: 43 programmes, being 11 grant-in-aid B.E. branches, 23 M.E. specialisations, B.Arch, M.Arch, B.Pharm and the six M.Pharm specialisations. The engineering faculty's self-financed wing, aerospace and computer science and mechanical, is counselled by the same committee and appears on neither list.

Where a portal programme's fee is published, it sits on that programme's own page, and the pages are not consistent with one another: many print a rupee figure, and the rest leave the row at a dash, at "As per University Rules" or at "See Prospectus", which sends the applicant to the faculty office. The Bachelor in Psychology page is one of the blank ones. It gives the intake capacity as 70, the length as 4 years across eight semesters, the eligibility as 10+2 with 50% marks, and the admission mode as the GCAS portal, names an entrance test run by the Department of Psychology, then leaves both the test date and the fee row empty.

Where a figure is printed, the first thing to notice is that a boy and a girl are quoted different prices for the same seat. B.A. (Honours) in Archaeology and Ancient History is Rs 7,740 for a boy and Rs 6,540 for a girl, M.Sc. Botany is Rs 9,700 and Rs 8,500 per annum, the Master of Social Work is Rs 9,660 and Rs 7,860, B.Ed. is Rs 7,600 and Rs 5,100 on top of a Rs 1,725 examination fee, and B.P.A. Kathak is Rs 9,060 and Rs 7,560 per annum with examination fees included. The Faculty of Law quotes Rs 8,560 for a boy and Rs 6,760 for a girl, approximate and per year, on the general LL.B..

The second is the distance between a grant-in-aid seat and a higher-payment seat in the same department. The M.Sc. Bio-Chemistry page prints both: Rs 9,700 a year for boys and Rs 8,500 for girls on the grant-in-aid seats, and Rs 45,600 for boys and girls alike on the higher-payment seats. Some programmes are higher-payment throughout, and they are where this university turns expensive: M.Sc. Environmental Science at Rs 91,190 per annum and the B.Des. and M.Des. at Rs 1,37,300 plus examination fees. At the other end of the same portal sits the Diploma in Indian Classical Music (Vocal), at Rs 450 for boys and Rs 420 for girls.

The professional seats are priced outside the university altogether, and those numbers are the smallest on this page.

The faculties repeat those figures on their own pages, so the two authorities agree: the B.Pharm page prints tuition of Rs 2,100 per annum for boys and nil for girls, and the M.Pharm page Rs 1,500 for boys and nil for girls. The committee's B.E. number, though, is only the tuition slice, and a candidate who plans against it will be short. The engineering faculty's Chemical Engineering page puts the total for two semesters at around Rs 8,500 for boys and around Rs 8,500 for girls, with the Rs 1,500 paid at the committee credited against it, so the girls' nil is a discount on the committee's tuition line and not on what the faculty bills.

One pair of programmes sits awkwardly across the two lists. The university's professional-courses page names MCA and MBA among the degrees admitted through the state committee even though both appear on the portal list, so an applicant to either should confirm the route with the faculty office before applying anywhere.

MBBS carries charges beyond tuition that the medical committee's sheet prints, and the hostel line is where this college is expensive rather than cheap. A government-quota student here is billed Rs 10,000 for hostel and Rs 4,525 in university fees on top of the Rs 25,000 tuition, against a hostel charge of Rs 1,200 at B. J. Medical College in Ahmedabad on the same sheet.

For students who cannot meet even these amounts, the university runs its own relief rather than routing everyone to a state scheme. The Directorate of Students' Welfare takes applications from students whose family income is under 3.5 lakh a year with 55% in the previous examination, and reports having disbursed Rs 6,70,04,852 to 16,593 students since 2012-13, including Rs 90,40,490 to 2,004 students in one pandemic year.

Four doors lead into this university and they do not connect. MSU states the penalty for the wrong one itself: a registration made in any branch other than the one the committee allotted will not be counted for enrolment.

The first door is the university's own student portal, which takes the 209 programmes on its own admission list, with the state's common admission service sitting in front of it: most programme pages record the mode of admission as the GCAS portal. A department that selects on a test rather than on marks says so in that field instead, as the Faculty of Law does against the 240 seats on its general LL.B..

The second door belongs to the engineering and pharmacy faculties, and the sequence there catches people out. The university's instruction is that a candidate applies on the state committee's website for degree and postgraduate professional courses, or the diploma committee's site for diplomas, and only after being allotted a seat reports to the faculty office with the allotment letter and registers on the university portal; the permanent registration number is issued only after the university verifies the name against the committee's admission list, verifies certificates, and receives the fee. The same page warns that a student must register in the branch the committee allotted and that registration in any other branch will not be counted for enrolment.

The third door is medicine, and it is not the university's door at all. Government Medical College Vadodara, which calls itself Medical College Baroda on its own site, describes itself as an institution under the Health and Family Welfare Department of the Government of Gujarat that functions as the Faculty of Medicine of this university, which awards the degrees. Admission is therefore run by the state's medical admission committee, constituted under the Gujarat Professional Educational Medical Colleges or Institutions (Regulation of Admission and Fixation of Fees) Act, on NEET merit.

The fourth door is doctoral entry, which the university keeps entirely in house through its own PhD admission process rather than through either committee.

Three authorities close three lists here every year, and only the medical one is measured in a number a candidate would recognise from an all-India exam.

Pharmacy is the tightest of them. On the state committee's institute-wise sheet after the third round, the grant-in-aid degree pharmacy seats here closed as follows.

That general closing number is worth holding next to the state's better-known pharmacy address. On the same sheet, the grant-in-aid degree pharmacy course at L.M. College of Pharmacy in Ahmedabad closed at 263 while this faculty closed at 162, so the harder seat in Gujarat pharmacy this cycle was in Vadodara. That sheet carries two more closures for this faculty on the NEET side, at 800043 for general and 800461 for Scheduled Caste. Those are positions in the committee's separate NEET register, and nothing in the table above is comparable to them.

Engineering closes branch by branch, and the spread across the Faculty of Technology and Engineering is enormous.

Computer science and textile processing sit at opposite ends of one merit list here, so a rank nowhere near the flagship branch may still be comfortable in one of the four textile lines, which between them hold the widest closing range on this list. The self-financed wing of the same faculty runs looser again: its computer science seats closed at 4598, mechanical at 9487 and aerospace at 17955 in the same round.

MBBS is measured in NEET ranks rather than state merit numbers. The medical committee's institute-wise closure list for 2025 records the government-quota seats at Government Medical College Vadodara as follows.

The university's own placements page is empty below its heading, so the only audited placement record for any part of this university is the return its Faculty of Pharmacy filed with the national ranking framework. It does not read well for the bachelor's degree.

Read down the two blocks and the four-year degree looks like a route to the two-year one rather than to a job. In 2023-24 the bachelor's cohort put 2 of its 28 on-time graduates into employment and 26 into further study, while the master's cohort placed 38 of 48 at a median of Rs 3,25,017. A candidate weighing the B.Pharm seat here should price it as the first half of a six-year plan.

Nothing comparable exists for the other thirteen faculties. The university's profile page claims that the Faculties of Social Work and Management Studies have achieved 100% placement and that an overall average of 65% placement is the normal trend on and off campus, but attaches no year, no cohort size and no median to either figure, and no faculty-level return backs them up. Treat both as the institution's own undated statement.

Every professional seat here is counted outside the university, by the committee that fills it, and the count, the quota split and the tuition are printed against each faculty.

Not one management seat exists on any of those lists, so there is no paid route past the merit list into engineering, pharmacy or medicine here. The self-financed institutes further down the same pharmacy sheet do carry management seats, which is what makes the absence worth noticing when offers are compared.

Within the 40 pharmacy seats the committee publishes a category split as well: 3 for EWS, 3 for Scheduled Caste, 5 for Scheduled Tribe, 10 for SEBC and 18 open, with 3 of those reserved across categories for candidates with disability. On the engineering side the branch intakes range from 38 in five of the eleven branches, up to 150 in civil and 113 in mechanical.

The pharmacy faculty has been growing, and its master's is now the larger half of it. The four-year degree was sanctioned for 30 seats in 2020-21 and again in 2021-22, has carried 40 since 2022-23, and sits below the two-year master's, sanctioned at 42 across both of those later years.

Three entries in the 2025 national rankings, and only one of them is a number. Pharmacy is the scored one, at rank 46 on 53.45 overall, and the five parameters underneath it pull in opposite directions.

Graduation outcomes holding the score up while research and perception drag on it is what you would expect of a faculty whose bachelor's cohort mostly walks into its own master's rather than into a job. The other two entries carry no score at all. The engineering table puts this university in its 201-300 rank band, an alphabetical list with no rank, no score and no data submission behind it. The state public universities table does the same in its 51-100 rank band. Neither can be set against the pharmacy figures, because neither carries any.

The university's own ranking page tells an older story that a candidate should date before using. It displays 90 for University and a 101-150 band for Overall with no year against either, and the link under that panel goes to the 2021 tables rather than a current one. Both belong to that cycle: the university stood at rank 90 among universities on a score of 39.48 and inside the 101-150 Overall rank band in 2021. It has not been scored in either table since, though it has kept turning up in their unscored bands: the University band 101-150 in 2022 and again in 2023, the Overall band 151-200 in 2022, and the University band 151-200 in 2024.

The same page also carries external placements: 1201+ from Times Higher Education, a 451-600 band in QS Asia, 78 in QS India, 20 in India on Scimago, 31 in India on Hansa Week and 36 in India with 1 in Gujarat on EduRank.

Fourteen faculties, and they run from medicine and engineering through to dramatics and tabla: Arts, Science, Commerce, Medicine, Technology and Engineering, Law, Education and Psychology, Family and Community Sciences, Social Work, Fine Arts, Performing Arts, Journalism and Communication, Management Studies and Pharmacy. The university counts 111 departments under those 14 faculties, alongside 3 constituent colleges, 8 institutes and 13 centres of specialised studies.

The Faculty of Performing Arts alone accounts for 15 of the 209 programmes on the portal list, admitting separately to Kathak and Bharatnatyam at both bachelor's and master's level, to dramatics, to classical vocal, to sitar, to violin and to tabla, while Fine Arts runs painting, sculpture, graphic arts, applied arts, museology and art history and aesthetics as separate degrees.

The named institutes sit outside the faculty structure and cover ground the departments do not: the Oriental Institute, the Water Resources Engineering and Management Institute, the Dr. Vikram Sarabhai Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology, the Institute of Climate Change Research, the Institute of Fashion Technology, the Institute of Leadership and Governance and the Maharaja Ranjitsinh Gaekwad Institute of Design. The constituent colleges also report to the university: the Baroda Sanskrit Mahavidyalaya, the Polytechnic, and M. K. Amin Arts and Science College and College of Commerce at Padra.

The library system is old enough to have a founding gift. The Smt. Hansa Mehta Library was established on May 1, 1950 with a collection of 25,000 books handed over from the two state libraries of the former Baroda State, its foundation stone was laid by Dr. Rajendra Prasad on 16th November 1954, and the present building dates from 1957. Around it sit 13 constituent and 25 departmental libraries holding over 8 lakh books and periodicals and above 14000 digitised dissertations and theses, with a single air-conditioned reading room seating about 1600 readers and opening 14 hours a day.

The engineering and pharmacy faculties have their own library, and it is separately stocked. The Prof. T. K. Gajjar Library dates itself to 1890, occupies 27976 square feet in a building from 1984, serves 2751 registered readers and holds 1,30,651 books with 61 journal subscriptions, 44 of them Indian and 17 foreign.

The campus also holds collections that are not teaching aids but holdings in their own right. The Archaeological Museum keeps Harappan unicorn seals, holy relics of Lord Buddha, Toraman and terracotta Buddha images, and the university runs an astronomical observatory set up in 1939 that holds an 8-inch refractor telescope. The Botanical Garden was established in 1920 over about 2.5 acres, with an arboretum of about 4.5 acres added in 1962, and now holds over 1,059 species including 680 angiosperms and 281 trees, a medicinal plant section of roughly 350 plots added in 2009, and an aquatic pond carrying 84 aquatic species and 41 lotus species.

Sport is laid out around a union pavilion, with an athletic track, a cricket ground, hockey and football fields, two tennis courts, two basketball courts, four volleyball courts, two kabaddi grounds, malkhamb, a kho-kho ground, a handball court and a swimming pool outdoors, and a table tennis hall, badminton court, gymnasium and multipurpose hall indoors.

The university calls its hostel campus one of the largest in western India, and the count behind that is published. It runs 12 boys' hostels and 4 girls' hostels with approximate accommodation for 2900 and 2000 students respectively, 4900 in all, each room furnished with a bed, a cupboard, a table and a chair, and every hostel fitted with automatic gas-fired hot water boilers, a dining hall and a common hall.

The halls are named after people connected to the place rather than numbered. The boys' halls on the main campus are Jivraj Mehta, K. M. Munshi, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Maharshi Arvind, Manubhai Mehta, Nusservanji Vakil, Sardar Patel, T. K. Gajjar and Vikram Sarabhai, with Sir M. Visvesvaraya, Rabindranath Tagore and Siddharaj Jaisinh on the polytechnic campus; the girls' halls are Hansa Mehta, Kasturba Gandhi, Pandita Gargi and Sarojini Devi.

For the professionally counselled seats the state committee records the position independently, and it agrees: against both the engineering and the pharmacy faculties it marks boys' hostel yes, girls' hostel yes, mess yes and transportation no. Medical students are billed separately for it, at Rs 10,000 on a government-quota seat on the committee's 2025-26 sheet.

The university reports more than 1450 highly qualified and experienced teaching staff across all 14 faculties, but publishes no faculty-wise breakdown of that number, so the only unit whose teaching strength is documented in detail is the one that files a ranking return.

That unit is small. The Faculty of Pharmacy entered 17 faculty members in its 2025 submission, against 154 undergraduate and 90 postgraduate students, with 20 full-time doctoral candidates and PhDs awarded to 2 in 2023-24, 6 in 2022-23 and 6 in 2021-22. The same return records 10 sponsored projects from 5 funding agencies worth Rs 84,62,420 in 2023-24, and 18 consultancy assignments for 10 client organisations worth Rs 2,86,600, which is part of what feeds the research score of 38.64 in the ranking table.

For any other faculty, the teaching and non-teaching staff lists are published department by department on the faculty sites rather than centrally, and a prospective research student should read the page of the department that would supervise them.

The university's own distinguished alumni register is sorted by field rather than by graduation year, under headings that run from civilian awards to sport and spiritual life.

The same register also claims Hansa Jivraj Mehta, K. M. Munshi, Vinoba Bhave, Sri Aurobindo and B. R. Ambedkar, and its own entries for them undercut the claim. Ambedkar's education line on the register names Mumbai, Columbia, the London School of Economics and Gray's Inn, Aurobindo's names King's College, Cambridge, and Hansa Mehta's records a graduation in philosophy in 1918, three decades before this university existed. Their Baroda connection is to the college and the princely state, not to a degree from the institution that lists them.

Several addresses in Vadodara belong to this one university, and the state committee prints a different one for the engineering and pharmacy seats than the university prints for itself.

Head office hours are Monday to Saturday, 10:30 am to 06:10 pm, closed on the second and fourth Saturday, Sunday and government-approved holidays. That college and its teaching hospital sit on a 36 acre campus in central Baroda, 1km from the Vadodara railway and bus stations and 3km from the airport.

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