Maulana Azad National Institute Of Technology, Bhopal

Civil and mechanical engineering, two of the three subjects this campus opened with in 1960, are the only undergraduate programmes at MANIT Bhopal carrying a live National Board of Accreditation status, and it runs to 31 December 2028. Computer science, the branch with the largest intake here, and electronics and communication have held no NBA accreditation since 30 June 2017. Hold that asymmetry while you read the rest: the 1,203 undergraduate seats MANIT advertises branch by branch, the tuition that moves with your family's income rather than your rank, and the placement medians in its own filings.

Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology answers to three names in ordinary use, MANIT, NIT Bhopal and, among older graduates, MACT. It began in 1960 as Maulana Azad College of Technology, running out of Govt. S.V. Polytechnic with an intake of 120 students and seven faculty members, two of them physicists, two chemists, two mathematicians and one mechanical engineer. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru laid the foundation stone of the institute building on 23 April 1961, the college moved into its own campus in 1964, and the name honours Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, described on the institute's own history page as a scholar and educationalist and a former Union Education Minister (MANIT, History).

The teaching order it grew in explains the campus you would walk onto today. Five-year degrees in civil, mechanical and electrical engineering came first; architecture followed in 1963; an industry-facing M.Tech in thermal and hydro electrical engineering opened in 1966 with UNESCO assistance; electronics and communication arrived in 1972, computer science and the MCA in 1986 and 1987, a master's in urban development in 1992 and an energy programme in 1997, the year the institute won academic autonomy. Deemed-university status followed in 2002 (MANIT, History). In its own accreditation filing MANIT records itself as an Institute of National Importance under central government ownership, with no affiliating university at all (NBA data capturing sheet, B.Tech Mechanical Engineering).

The student body is split almost exactly down the middle by geography. MANIT's NIRF 2025 engineering data return counts 4,058 undergraduates, of whom 1,989 come from within Madhya Pradesh and 2,010 from outside it, with 59 more from outside the country; its 478 taught postgraduates lean much further outward, 192 from the state against 286 from elsewhere. Two ranks sit on this one campus, and they disagree: 48.26 puts MANIT 81st on the Ministry of Education's NIRF 2025 engineering table, while 58.80 puts the same institute 17th on its architecture table.

Thirteen undergraduate entries share 1,203 sanctioned seats here, and only seven of them are ordinary four-year B.Tech branches. Alongside chemical, civil, computer science, electrical, electronics and communication, mechanical, and materials and metallurgical engineering sit a five-year B.Arch, a four-year B.Plan, two young single-subject B.Tech programmes in energy and electrical vehicle engineering and in electrical engineering with e-mobility, and two five-year dual degrees, one in mathematics and data science and one in engineering and computational mechanics (MANIT, UG programme).

Tuition is set by the household, not the branch. Every undergraduate at MANIT pays the same tuition as every other undergraduate in the same income band, whether the seat is in computer science or in planning, and the band is proved by an income certificate rather than assumed.

Over a full year the top band pays Rs 1,25,000 in tuition and the middle band Rs 41,668, while the bottom band and every SC, ST and PwD student pays none (admission notice, Annexure III). Architecture and planning students pay the same tuition and Rs 1,750 more each semester, a membership charge for NOSP, NASA and the study tour, which lifts their first-semester bill to Rs 25,750 as a day scholar and Rs 46,250 in a triple-occupancy room (admission notice, Annexures II and IV).

Two charges sit outside all of that and catch families out. Mess is billed yearly rather than by semester, at roughly Rs 32,500 a year, paid into the cooperative mess account of whichever hostel you are given; and a student allotted a double-seater room instead of a triple has 15 days to deposit another Rs 2,500 (admission notice).

The first-semester figure also flatters the years that follow it. Inside that Rs 24,000, the day scholar is paying Rs 5,000 of refundable caution money and a block of charges levied once and never again: Rs 3,000 for training and placement, Rs 2,000 each for the degree-and-migration line and for convocation, Rs 1,000 for the alumni fund and Rs 600 for registration and the medical examination. From the second semester onwards the day-scholar bill falls to Rs 10,400, and a hosteller's to Rs 20,900 before room rent (admission notice, Annexure III).

Postgraduate money works on a flatter scale, and the income bands vanish from it. An M.Tech admitted through CCMT bills Rs 59,500 in the first semester and an M.Plan Rs 60,500, the extra Rs 1,000 being a study tour; the MBA, the MCA taken through NIMCET and the M.Sc through CCMN all land at Rs 59,500, and a self-financed M.Tech or M.Plan pays Rs 83,000. The one relief on that sheet is category rather than income, and it does not reach every programme: tuition is zeroed for SC, ST and PwD candidates on the regular CCMT M.Tech and M.Plan seats and the CCMN M.Sc, but the MCA and MBA columns charge them the same Rs 35,000 as everyone else. A doctoral student pays Rs 31,500 in the first semester and gets no hostel at all (MANIT fee structure 2025-26).

Every one of the 1,203 home seats is filled on a JEE Main rank, spent through JoSAA and then through the CSAB special rounds; MANIT runs no entrance test of its own for them, and its undergraduate admission notices carry no other route. The one door that does not open on JoSAA is DASA, which the institute notifies separately for SAARC, non-SAARC and CIWG candidates, and those seats are supernumerary rather than carved out of the 1,203 (MANIT admission section, MANIT, UG programme). Where it becomes interesting is the money that has already changed hands by the time you reach Bhopal. Counselling collects a seat acceptance and partial admission fee of Rs 70,000 from a general, OBC or EWS candidate and Rs 30,000 from an SC, ST or PwD candidate, and MANIT's balance table sets that payment straight against the first-semester bill rather than treating it as an extra (MANIT admission notice, Annexure I).

Read that table and one band stands apart. Only the family earning above Rs 5 lakh arrives at the counter still owing the institute anything on a day-scholar seat, Rs 16,500, or Rs 37,000 with a hostel room; for an architecture or planning seat the same band owes Rs 18,250 and Rs 38,750 (admission notice, Annexure II). Everyone else has effectively paid the first semester before ever seeing Bhopal.

The certificate that decides which band you land in has a date on it. A general, OBC-NCL or EWS candidate must produce a family income certificate issued by the competent authority on or after 1 April 2026, and without it the institute charges the full fee, no appeal; SC, ST and PwD candidates and anyone above Rs 5 lakh need no certificate at all (admission notice, Annexure V). A separate annexure prints a state-by-state list of whose signature MANIT will accept, tahsildars and naib tahsildars for Madhya Pradesh, village officers for Kerala, circle officers for Bihar, which is worth reading before a family travelling in from another state queues at the wrong counter (admission notice, Annexure VII).

Reporting itself is rationed. For the 2026 intake the ERP portal took admission forms and balance fees from 10 to 18 August, physical reporting ran on 13 and 14 August and again from 16 to 18 August with 15 August left as a holiday, the counter opened from 10:00 in the morning to 1:00 in the afternoon, and the institute stated plainly that only 300 candidates would be admitted a day and the rest held over (admission notice). The venue is the Lecture Hall Complex beside the Energy Science and Engineering department, and the day is laid out room by room: registration and the help centre in the first hall, the medical examination in the second, document verification in the third, the admission slip and scholar number in the fourth, hostel allotment on the first floor in the fifth, and an air-conditioned waiting room for parents in the sixth.

Two answers buried in the notice's own FAQ change what a candidate should plan for. Asked outright whether a branch can be changed after admission, MANIT says no: upgradation is done after the first year and depends on eligibility, seat availability and the competent authority's approval, so the branch accepted in August is the branch studied for at least twelve months. Asked whether attendance is compulsory, it says every student must hold a minimum of 75 per cent in every course, every semester (admission notice, Annexure X). Postgraduate entry runs on separate machinery: CCMT with a GATE score for the M.Tech and M.Plan, CCMN with a JAM score for the M.Sc, NIMCET for the MCA, and a spot round when seats are left over (MANIT, PG programme, MANIT admission section).

MANIT publishes no closing-rank archive of its own. Work through its admission section and what you find is admission notices, fee structures, selection lists for the postgraduate programmes, spot-round brochures and section-wise roll lists of admitted students, but no year-by-year table of opening and closing ranks for its B.Tech branches (MANIT admission section). The authoritative record for a MANIT closing rank is therefore the Opening and Closing Ranks archive on the JoSAA portal, josaa.admissions.nic.in, read for your own category, your own quota and the round you are actually filling choices in.

What the institute's own filings do settle is how much room a late round is likely to leave, and the answer is very little. In the current academic year mechanical engineering admitted 181 students against a sanctioned 184, and its enrolment ratio has averaged 98.67 per cent over three years (NBA data capturing sheet, Mechanical Engineering); civil engineering filled all 101 of its seats in the same year and averaged 97.64 per cent over the same three (NBA data capturing sheet, Civil Engineering). A campus that closes each year within a few students of capacity is one whose cutoffs are set by demand rather than by leftovers, so plan against the live board rather than hoping a branch will slacken.

The home-state pool is the other thing to understand before reading any rank. Every rank at MANIT is quoted twice, once for candidates counted as Madhya Pradesh home-state and once for everybody else, and the two columns settle independently. The outcome, on MANIT's own headcount, is a campus that has not filled with local students: 1,989 of 4,058 undergraduates come from within the state against 2,010 from outside it (NIRF 2025 engineering data return). Treat the domicile as a lever that reads differently in every branch, and take its value from the two columns beside the branch you actually want.

MANIT's undergraduate median salary peaked in the middle of the three years it last filed and then gave the gain back. Its NIRF 2025 engineering data return records a median of Rs 11,00,000 for the batch that graduated on time in 2021-22, Rs 13,83,000 for 2022-23 and Rs 11,00,000 again for 2023-24, while the count of students placed climbed across all three years.

Those four rows tell one story if you read them together. More students graduated on time and more were placed in 2023-24 than in either year before it, and the median still slid back to where it had started, which means the extra offers arrived below the middle of the distribution rather than above it (NIRF 2025 return). The row moving fastest is higher studies, from 22 leavers to 66 in three years.

The postgraduate side moved the opposite way, and it moved while shrinking. MANIT's two-year cohort finishing on time fell from 425 to 328 to 246 across the same three years; the median it reports rose each time, Rs 7,00,000, then Rs 8,50,000, then Rs 10,09,000, while the number actually placed went 224, 245, 147 (NIRF 2025 engineering data return). Read the two halves together and the M.Tech median has closed most of the gap on the B.Tech median in three years, but on a class barely half the size it used to be.

The architecture and planning wing files separately, and its numbers are a different order entirely.

The B.Plan row is the one to look at twice. Only 10 of its 41 leavers were placed in 2023-24, down from 31 of 39 the year before, while 22 of them went into higher studies instead (NIRF 2025 architecture data return). A planning degree at MANIT is currently a route into a master's more often than into a job, and a family weighing that seat against a B.Tech should price it that way.

Branch by branch, the departments that file accreditation data show how wide the spread runs inside the engineering half. Mechanical engineering placed 159 of 205 final-year students in its last graduating year, with 2 more going to higher studies and 3 starting businesses, for a three-year average placement index of 83.06 (NBA data capturing sheet, Mechanical Engineering). Civil engineering placed 65 of 107 in the same season, sent 22 to higher studies, and averages 70.2 across three years (NBA data capturing sheet, Civil Engineering). None of that is where a candidate should stop, because MANIT publishes something rarer: a placement record for the season currently running, marked ongoing, one dated row per recruiter visit with the offer type, the UG and PG counts and the package, and rows still reading "result awaited" as the drive proceeds (MANIT placement data).

MANIT prints its entire undergraduate intake branch by branch on a public page, rather than leaving the split to be discovered on the counselling portal.

Computer science alone carries roughly one seat in five, and the four largest branches between them account for more than half the campus (MANIT, UG programme). Note that the 1,203 figure counts the five-year architecture and dual-degree entries too; the sanctioned intake MANIT files for four-year undergraduate programmes alone is 1,021, unchanged across four academic years, alongside 578 two-year postgraduate seats and 30 on the integrated stream (NIRF 2025 engineering data return).

Individual branch intakes do move. Mechanical engineering was sanctioned 212 seats for five consecutive years and is down to 184 in the current one (NBA data capturing sheet, Mechanical Engineering); civil has come down from 113 to 101 over the same stretch (NBA data capturing sheet, Civil Engineering). One row does not move at all: lateral entry stands at zero for every year MANIT has filed, so a diploma holder cannot join the second year here (NIRF 2025 engineering data return).

On the postgraduate side the published grid is finer still. Structural engineering, advanced computing, computer networks, information security, VLSI design and embedded systems and the M.Tech in artificial intelligence each carry 25 seats, the MCA carries 115 through NIMCET and the MBA 66, while urban planning takes 18 and real estate development 8 (MANIT, PG programme).

MANIT appears on exactly two of the Ministry of Education's 2025 tables, and it places far better on the smaller one.

The five parameters behind those two scores are lopsided in the same direction on both tables.

Graduation outcomes, the parameter built from how many students actually finish and get placed, is MANIT's strongest column on both tables at 73.26 and 80.01. Perception, scored from a national survey of employers and academics rather than anything measured inside the gates, is its weakest at 9.92 and 22.73 (engineering ranking, architecture ranking). The gap between those two columns is the widest on either table, and it says the graduates travel further than the name does. For a candidate weighing MANIT, that is an argument for reading the placement filings above rather than trusting where the brand sits in a conversation.

Seven four-year branches make the undergraduate campus look narrow. The postgraduate grid is where MANIT actually broadens out: it lists twenty-six M.Tech specialisations, two M.Plan streams, an MCA, an MBA, three M.Sc entries taken through CCMN and a three-year M.Sc-plus-M.Tech in materials and metallurgical engineering, taught out of the engineering departments plus architecture and planning, biological science and engineering, chemistry, physics, management studies and a combined department of mathematics, bioinformatics and computer applications (MANIT, PG programme).

Three of those specialisations sit outside a department altogether, which is where the newest work has been parked. The M.Tech in artificial intelligence, with 25 seats, is run by the Centre for Artificial Intelligence rather than by computer science; smart manufacturing belongs to the Centre of Excellence in Product Design and Smart Manufacturing; and renewable energy, the one MANIT postgraduate programme still holding NBA accreditation, is taught at the Energy Centre. Civil engineering carries the broadest spread of any single department, seven streams covering environmental, geoinformatics, geotechnical, water resources, structural, transportation and, newly, infrastructure engineering and construction management (MANIT, PG programme). Its geotechnical programme has been running since 1968; hydropower engineering, older still at 1966, closed in 2025 (NBA data capturing sheet, Civil Engineering). If you are choosing a specialisation rather than a branch, the department, and its start and close dates, is the unit that matters.

The campus runs to 650 acres inside a boundary wall and a ring road, divided into an academic sector, a hostel section and a residential area, with a post office, a shopping complex, a school for children, a dispensary staffed by two doctors with expert doctors visiting weekly, and an auditorium seating 1,000. There are 369 staff quarters on the estate (MANIT, About Us), and the artificial lake and boat club on it, Lotus Lake, were built in 2014 (MANIT, History).

The Central Library's own December 2024 count is worth reading closely, because the two book banks are the tell. Its shelves carry 155,082 books, a separate Hindi collection of 5,479, 1,627 theses and dissertations, 6,805 e-books and 4,959 e-journals; the SC and ST Book Bank runs to 21,598 volumes against 7,115 in the general book bank (MANIT, About Central Library). A lending stock set aside for reserved-category students at three times the size of the general one is a real, funded commitment rather than a line in a brochure.

Where the money went in 2023-24 says what the institute has been building. Engineering workshops took Rs 22,33,59,599 that year, up from Rs 4,93,28,653 twelve months earlier; new equipment and software for laboratories took Rs 5,58,76,242, and the library Rs 3,48,20,947 (NIRF 2025 engineering data return). A more than fourfold jump in workshop spending in a single year is the signature of a campus re-equipping its manufacturing and fabrication side, and MANIT opened two programmes on that side shortly afterwards, a B.Tech in energy and electric vehicles under Energy Science and Engineering and one in engineering computational mechanics under Mechanical Engineering, both starting in 2025 (NBA data capturing sheet, Mechanical Engineering).

This is a residential campus with a hard local exception. The About Us page counts seven boys' hostels housing 2,500 students and two girls' hostels housing 900, across 14,011 square metres of built-up hostel space (MANIT, About Us). The hostel section names more blocks than that, so the live count is a question for the hostel office rather than for either page: on the boys' side it lists the Homi Jehangir Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai, A.P. Kanivide, Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman, Mokshagundam Visvesvarayya, Jagadish Chandra Bose, Ramanujan and Raja Ramanna Bhawans alongside two numbered blocks, and on the girls' side Kalpana Chawla and Bhagini Nivedita (MANIT, Hostels).

The exception is for Bhopal itself. Candidates whose permanent residence is in the city are placed last in the hostel queue and get a room only if one is free after everyone from outside is housed, and the institute runs no bus or transport service for day scholars living off campus (admission notice, Annexure X). A local family should budget for a daily commute rather than assume a bed.

The bill itself is straightforward. Hostel caution money is Rs 5,000, refundable and taken once; maintenance covering electricity, water and sanitation is Rs 10,500 a semester; room rent is Rs 5,000 a semester on triple occupancy and Rs 7,500 on double. A single room is not offered on the JoSAA and CSAB undergraduate sheet at all, and the Rs 10,000 single-occupancy rate turns up only on the DASA, postgraduate and part-time scales (MANIT admission notice, Annexure III, MANIT fee structure 2025-26). Mess is separate, yearly and deposited into the respective hostel's cooperative mess account (MANIT, Hostels). Doctoral students are not offered hostel accommodation at all.

MANIT entered 263 faculty members on its engineering return and 47 on the architecture one (NIRF 2025 engineering data return, NIRF 2025 architecture data return). The doctoral register under them is unusual in its shape rather than its size: 475 scholars are enrolled full-time and none part-time, and the completions column has swung to match, from 19 full-time and 31 part-time doctorates in 2021-22 to 57 and 8 in 2022-23 and then 46 full-time with no part-time at all in 2023-24 (NIRF 2025 engineering data return). A working engineer looking for a part-time doctorate should read that trend before applying.

Research money moved the other way from research volume in 2023-24. MANIT received Rs 9,41,50,229 across 41 sponsored projects from 22 funding agencies, against Rs 5,31,33,055 across 63 projects from 38 agencies the year before, so a third fewer projects brought in far more money (NIRF 2025 engineering data return). Consultancy stayed heavy and slightly softer, 446 projects for 279 client organisations at Rs 8,73,00,000, down from 544 projects the previous year. For the first time in the three years filed, the sponsored-research line finished ahead of the consultancy line.

Publication output is concentrated in the older departments. Mechanical engineering alone published 146 peer-reviewed journal papers in its current filing year, after 142, 144 and 175 in the three before it, with 44 faculty in the department against 35 two years earlier (NBA data capturing sheet, Mechanical Engineering); civil engineering filed 94 journal papers against 62 and 44 in the two preceding years (NBA data capturing sheet, Civil Engineering). Civil's staff also carry an unusually public consultancy book, proof-checking structural and hydraulic designs for the Madhya Pradesh Public Works Department, MPRDC, CPWD and state water-supply schemes.

MANIT names its Distinguished Alumni itself, which makes this list checkable against the institute rather than against a listicle. Its 2023 citation honoured Venkatesh Shukla of the 1975 electronics batch, a former Indian Revenue Service officer and former Chairman of TiE Global who is now Managing Partner of Monta Vista Capital in the United States, and Vivek Dewangan of the 1989 electronics batch, an IAS officer serving as Chairman and Managing Director of REC Ltd, a Maharatna public sector undertaking (MANIT, Distinguished Alumni Award 2023).

Both came out of electronics and communication, a department that opened here in 1972 (MANIT, History) and whose last NBA term ended on 30 June 2017, which is a fair caution against reading an accreditation date as a verdict on a department's graduates. The Training and Placement Cell separately profiles the alumni who help it recruit, among them a vice-president of product engineering at Trianz, a senior engineering manager at Nutanix, the senior vice-president of technology at Junglee Games and a 1995 civil graduate of the MACT years who has spent two decades running EPC projects for Sumitomo Mitsui Construction India (MANIT Training and Placement Cell).

Nothing here moves faster than MANIT's own notice machinery, and during counselling weeks it changes daily. The admission section stacks notices rather than replacing them, so the undergraduate one for 2026-27 is filed as revised on 11 August 2026 with the superseded version still visible beside it, next to the internal-sliding circular, the spot-round brochures and the section-wise roll list of students admitted this year (MANIT admission section). The placement page runs on the same principle: the 2025-26 record is published while the season is still open rather than tidied up after it closes (MANIT placement data). Read both at source before acting on a date or an amount.

Madhya Pradesh puts three names inside the NIRF 2025 engineering top 100. MANIT is the middle one, and the two on either side of it are reached by different exams.

The gate matters more than the gap for most candidates. IIT Indore admits through JEE Advanced and MANIT through JEE Main and JoSAA, so for a great many applicants the two are not alternatives at all, and the live comparison is between MANIT and the private and state options a JEE Main rank also reaches.

The comparison that does bite is inside Bhopal, and it is about architecture. The School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal, a specialist institute in the same city, takes rank 11 on the NIRF 2025 architecture table with a score of 60.69, six places and nearly two points above MANIT's rank 17 and 58.80. An architecture aspirant with a JEE Main Paper 2 rank good enough for MANIT has a better-placed school within the same city limits, and the honest way to choose between them is on studio culture, faculty and the placement records above rather than on the NIT name.

The campus sits on Link Road Number 3 near Kali Mata Mandir, and MANIT prints its own police station, Kamala Nagar, on the admission checklist so that a candidate filling the anti-ragging affidavit enters the right one. For anything binding, a fee amount, a reporting date, a document list, deal with the offices below rather than with a summary of them.

At a glance

Quick facts