Mohan Lal Sukhadia University, Uaipur

Mohanlal Sukhadia University appears twice in the 2025 India Rankings and only one of the two entries carries a number. The scored one is the pharmacy table, filed by a Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences opened in 1994 that takes 40 students a year and that the university calls the only pharmacy department run by a university anywhere in Rajasthan; the other is a rank-band in the state public universities category, published as a name in an alphabetical list with no score and no position. MLSU is a general state university at Udaipur, Rajasthan, teaching arts, commerce, science, law, management, education, architecture and engineering. That split has a practical consequence for anyone comparing MLSU with a ranked private university: pharmacy files student, placement and spending figures with the Ministry of Education, and no other programme on this campus files anything of the kind. The fees, seat counts and merit positions of everything else sit in a prospectus chapter or a dated notice on the admission portal instead.

MLSU was created by a state Act, and the reach it claims is regional rather than campus-bound. It was set up in 1962 as Udaipur University, it describes its remit as higher education for southern Rajasthan with more than 2.25 lakh students, and it sits in the Aravalli hill area in a belt largely of tribal population. Two things sit under that one name and they are not the same: the teaching MLSU does itself, in its own departments and university colleges at Udaipur, and the colleges it affiliates across four districts of the region, which it examines and awards degrees to but does not run. The NAAC peer team that assessed the campus counted 9 faculties or schools, 38 departments and centres and 97 programmes on offer; the affiliated colleges are counted separately and staffed by their own managements.

The scored ranking resolves into five parameters, and the five disagree with each other. The NIRF 2025 pharmacy table places Mohan Lal Sukhadia University 64th on an overall score of 48.19.

Teaching and graduation outcomes both land in the sixties while research and professional practice sits at 31.91, so the department is being credited for running its degree rather than for the volume it publishes. Perception is the outlier: at 5.12, only four entries on the whole 2025 pharmacy table score lower. A pharmacy department that answers to the name of a general state university has no reputation of its own to trade on, and outside Rajasthan the name it borrows is known for arts, commerce and science.

MLSU publishes its whole teaching list as one roll, which is why the range is easy to underestimate from a course-search box. The university's programme page lists every degree, PG diploma, diploma and certificate it ran in the last five years covered by the list, 2017 to 2022, and it runs from B.A., B.Com and B.Sc through B.Pharm, B.Tech, B.Arch, the BBA lines in hotel management, tourism and entrepreneurship development, B.Voc, the five-year integrated B.A. LL.B. and B.Com LL.B., an MBA with e-commerce, financial services and executive variants, the M.A. and M.Sc. spread, MCA, M.Ed., LL.M., M.Phil and Ph.D., plus PG diplomas in cyber laws, taxation, journalism, public health entomology and yog education and certificate courses that include mushroom cultivation, vermitechnology and GST.

Only a handful of those doors open on an entrance test, and the portal settles which by what it notified through the 2026 cycle.

Fees are set out as heads rather than as one programme price, and the striking part of the chapter is who is charged nothing. The fee chapter bills tuition monthly across the twelve months from July to June, at a rate set by whether the student's guardian pays income tax, and its notes then cancel tuition for Indian women students in the undergraduate and postgraduate courses, for Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and non-creamy-layer Other Backward Class students, and for ex-servicemen permanently disabled and settled in Rajasthan and their dependants. The same chapter draws the limit of that waiver itself: it states that in the self-financed professional and extended courses the tuition fee continues to be charged alongside the other heads. The waiver therefore reaches the ordinary arts, commerce and science seats and stops at the fee-funded professional ones, which is the distinction a B.Tech or MBA applicant has to make before assuming the tuition line is zero. Blind students in undergraduate and postgraduate courses are released from the tuition, examination, library, library-caution, sports and student-aid heads as well, though the laboratory fee is not on that list.

How far those waivers actually reach is visible only where a department has had to file a return. The B.Pharm roll of 170 in the year of the filing included 113 students recorded as socially challenged and 16 as economically backward, and within that group the return counts 48 whose tuition was fully reimbursed from state and central government funds, 8 reimbursed by private bodies, and 73 not fully reimbursed at all. Reserved-category status and a fee waiver are not the same thing here, and the gap between the two is where a Rajasthan applicant should check their own position.

There is no departmental application counter at MLSU. One online admission portal carries every level, with separate streams for undergraduate, postgraduate, doctoral and diploma or certificate entry, its own hostel application and continuity forms, and a candidate login that issues the entrance admit card. Engineering is the exception: the portal carries no B.Tech admission notification, and the branch lists the university does issue are for spot admission, the round that runs on seats left over after an earlier allotment.

Merit is then built one of two ways. For the first year of the law degrees, the previous year of the postgraduate science classes and the other programmes the university notifies separately, the merit order is built in equal halves from the entrance test score and from the theory marks of the optional subjects at graduation, with practicals left out; in the courses outside the law faculty, the postgraduate sciences and the other professional programmes, merit is the qualifying examination score with weightage marks added for co-curricular activities. That second route is the one most arts, commerce and science applicants meet, and it is why a strong practical score does not help a law or postgraduate science candidate here at all.

One rule in the same chapter catches out applicants from outside the state. An applicant who qualified from a board or university outside Rajasthan counts as a Rajasthan resident only on production of a Rajasthan domicile certificate and a caste certificate issued by a competent authority, and without both is placed in the general category even where they belong to a reserved one, with a separate minimum-marks bar to clear as well.

Reservation on the seats themselves follows the Rajasthan state pattern, covering Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, non-creamy-layer Other Backward Classes, the More Backward Classes, the economically weaker sections, a horizontal share for candidates with disabilities, displaced Kashmiris, the wards of defence and Rajasthan police personnel and the children of the university's own teaching and non-teaching staff. In the self-financed programmes that reservation narrows to the Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and non-creamy-layer Other Backward Class categories alone, and across every programme, self-financed ones included, Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe candidates pay half the entrance test application amount. Transgender candidates are admitted to the co-educational colleges at the minimum pass mark, on seats over and above the sanctioned strength.

MLSU's admission year is long at both ends, and an applicant can miss it from either. The last date for admission to the postgraduate science subjects was extended by a notice dated 5 September 2026, and an MCA direct admission notice for 2026-27 followed on 7 September 2026. Anyone treating September as the deadline, though, will find the entrance tests two months gone: the MLSULET law keys and the MBA answer key were both out in June.

MLSU publishes its admission rankings in two different shapes, and only one of the two shows the marks behind the order. Which shape a programme gets is not a policy the university states anywhere; it follows the office that issued the list.

The bare shape is the one the 2026 engineering round used. MLSU issued a separate spot-admission merit list for each branch on 25 August 2026, one for computer science engineering and one for civil among them, and the computer science list prints the degree, the college, the candidate's name, the father's name, gender, category and a merit number, with no marks column and no closing score.

The fuller shape carries everything. The Department of Physics at the University College of Science published a final merit list for M.Sc. Semester I admission in 2017-18 that prints, for every applicant, the entrance mark out of 100, the B.Sc. theory percentage, the two added together and the average that ordered the list, which makes the last admitted name on it a closing score in everything but label. The B.Pharm draft admission list for the same year prints each applicant's board, qualifying percentage and weightage marks for checking before admission, and the Faculty of Law published how far down its own list it was calling, merit numbers 1 to 120 for the regular seats and 1 to 300 for the self-financed seats, on separate counselling days.

Neither shape carries anything stable into the next cycle. For the law and postgraduate science programmes the order is half a paper MLSU writes and marks itself and half a graduation transcript, two inputs that change together every year, so last year's closing position describes last year's applicants and not the bar a new one has to clear. The seats keep moving after the first list as well: the portal shows the MBA vacant seats going to a notification and an advertisement, then to counselling, and then to a further admission notification and a physical counselling round, all inside three weeks.

So the thing to ask MLSU for is the list, not a cutoff. It publishes no headline closing mark or percentile for a programme, but where it has published a departmental list in full the marks are on the face of it, and the law faculty's counselling notice shows the merit range that was actually called. The usable signal is therefore how far down a given year's list the admissions ran and how many mop-up rounds followed it.

One MLSU department reports placements through a primary channel, and it reports them in full. The pharmacy department's NIRF return sets out three graduating batches with the number placed, the median salary and the number who went on to higher study.

The median for those who took a job rose from Rs 2,50,000 to Rs 4,40,000 across the three filings, and over the same period the number leaving for further study climbed from 9 to 16 while the number placed peaked at 25 in the middle year and came down to 18 in the last, so the two destinations ended the run within a few students of each other.

Where the further-study leavers went is the part specific to MLSU. Across every batch in that table the department's own course list ran to the B.Pharm and the doctorate and nothing between them, so a graduate who wanted a master's in pharmacy had to leave Udaipur for it. That gap has only just closed, and it closed late: the admission portal now carries an M.Pharm in Pharmaceutics notification, too recent to have held on to anyone counted above.

The rest of the campus files no batch-level return, but it is not silent either. The Training and Placement Centre describes its work as inviting employers from information technology, banking and finance, law, manufacturing, media, services and the social sector, and its activity page carries an ICICI Prudential campus drive at the Faculty of Management Studies and a campus-placement training programme run for the M.Sc. Geology students. Behind that page it publishes a destination register department by department, with a row for each graduate giving the student's name, the session, the organisation, the designation and the year of placement. The computer science register names employers including Infosys, Advaiya Solutions, TatvaSoft, E-Connect Solutions, Auriga IT and NIC Udaipur; the zoology one runs to research and teaching posts, at AIIMS New Delhi, R.N.T. Medical College Udaipur and the Directorate of Higher Education, Government of Rajasthan. Registers of the same shape exist for the tourism and hotel management programme, geography, readymade garments, BBA, biotechnology, economics, botany, Sanskrit, microbiology, music, political science, public administration and visual arts.

What that register does not carry is a share of any batch placed or a salary at any level, and a handful of its rows honestly record no job at all, so it is a list of destinations and not a placement rate. The university says as much itself: its self-study report lists inadequate documentation of post-qualification employment status among its own institutional weaknesses, and the peer team put campus placement of students across all the departments among the challenges facing the university, alongside limited industry-academia interaction. A campus-wide MLSU placement percentage quoted anywhere else has nothing published on this campus to check it against.

The seat counts that carry legal weight at MLSU belong to pharmacy, because pharmacy is the one discipline here whose intake a national regulator has to sign. A Pharmacy Council of India decision letter dated 17 April 2023 files the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences under the code PCI-481 and sets its approved intake at 40 for B.Pharm and 12 for M.Pharm Pharmaceutics, both running to the 2025-2026 academic session. Those are ceilings, not targets. The older council letter the university keeps beside it, dated April 2013, approved the same B.Pharm strength and instructed the institution to restrict admission to the sanctioned intake and to admit nobody beyond it without the council's prior approval.

The B.Pharm ceiling has not moved. The department's India Rankings 2025 filing enters an approved intake of 40 in each of 2023-24, 2022-23, 2021-22 and 2020-21, and leaves the two earlier columns empty. Set the admissions beside the seats in that same filing and one year breaks the pattern: 40 first-year seats drew 40 admissions in 2018-19 and 40 again in 2020-21, but 46 students were admitted against those 40 seats in 2019-20, the year 3 more came in by lateral entry. An applicant reading both documents together should note that the council's condition and that one year's admitted figure do not sit comfortably side by side, and that the current approval runs only to the 2025-2026 session, so a candidate applying now should ask to see the renewal.

For the rest of the campus the seat matrix is a notice rather than a standing document. The admission portal's notification list carries an MBA seat matrix, a separate seat matrix for BBA (Entrepreneurship Development) and a notice pairing the public health entomology diploma notification with its seat matrix, each of them a link into the portal's notice viewer rather than a file, and the viewer returns a server error rather than the notice when the link is opened from outside a portal session.

So an applicant to any arts, commerce, science, law, management, architecture or engineering programme here has no standing seat matrix to consult, only the notice issued for that programme in that cycle. The branch-wise spot-admission lists MLSU publishes afterwards are the nearest thing to a record of how many places there turned out to be.

MLSU has held a place in the India Rankings pharmacy table for five consecutive editions, and the interesting column in that run is not the rank.

Only one of the five parameters moves in a single direction across that run, and it is the research one. It stood at 14.95 in the first of those editions and at 31.91 in the latest, more than doubling, while the rank wandered and ended three places better than it began.

The wandering deserves a moment before any single year is treated as the department's level. Its 2023 score of 43.54 came in barely a quarter of a point under the 43.80 it scored in 2022, and that quarter of a point arrived with a drop of thirteen places, because the field around it had thickened. A position in this part of a pharmacy table records who else filed that year as much as it records the department.

Perception is the flat line. It was returned as 0.00 in the first edition and has never risen above the 5.49 it reached in 2022, which is what happens to a department whose academic reputation travels under the name of a general university rather than a pharmacy institute.

India Rankings 2025 lists Mohan Lal Sukhadia University in the state public universities category in the rank-band of 51-100, which NIRF publishes as an alphabetical list of names with no score and no individual position, so it establishes that the university was ranked in that category and nothing about where inside the band it sat. Its last banded appearance in the general university table was India Rankings 2020, at 151-200, and that is still the line the university runs across the header of its Training and Placement Centre site. Beyond pharmacy and those two bands MLSU sits in no NIRF table, so a prospective student weighing the university as a whole has a band and no score to weigh it with.

MLSU's own menu sorts its departments into faculties, and the grouping is worth reading before an application, because it decides which dean signs the forms. Science holds biotechnology, botany, chemistry, computer science, environment science, geology, industrial chemistry, mathematics and statistics, microbiology, pharmaceutical sciences, physics, polymer science and zoology; commerce holds accountancy and business statistics, banking and business economics and business administration; management studies holds management studies and tourism and hotel management; humanities holds English, Hindi, Jainology and Prakrit, philosophy, Rajasthani, Sanskrit, Urdu, visual arts and music; social science holds economics, history, journalism, library and information science, political science, psychology, public administration and sociology; and law, earth science, education, engineering and technology and architecture each carry a faculty of their own, with fashion technology and designing and the UGC Centre for Women's Studies outside the faculties altogether. Earth science is the one to check, because environment science and geology are listed under it and under science both, so the subject name alone does not settle which faculty a programme sits in. That untidiness is not an outsider's complaint: the peer team's first recommendation was that the university be restructured into faculties with allied departments under each.

Around those departments sit the university's own campus colleges, which is where most undergraduate teaching is done: the University College of Science, the University College of Commerce and Management Studies, the University College of Social Sciences and Humanities, the University College of Law, the Faculty of Management Studies, the College of Architecture that the B.Arch degree belongs to, and the Institute of Engineering and Technology that the B.Tech merit lists are issued for.

MLSU is also an affiliating university, and the extent of that role is published rather than implied. Its list of affiliated colleges for 2023-24 runs district by district through Chittorgarh, Rajsamand, Sirohi and Udaipur, and the Udaipur block alone reaches 101 entries. Its own site keeps the affiliation business in a separate wing of the menu: that college list, a college panel, an affiliation fee schedule that has nothing to do with student fees, and registers of the lecturers and principals those colleges have registered with the university. What an affiliated college takes from the campus is the syllabus, the examination and the degree. Its fees, its placements and its seat count are set by its own management, so a number found on an affiliated college's page describes that college and not this one.

One corner of this campus describes its own estate in public, and it is the same corner that files the NIRF return. The pharmacy department occupies about five acres with fully equipped laboratories, seminar rooms and a medicinal garden, and it has held research projects funded by the University Grants Commission, DST-SERB and RUSA.

The campus behind that one department is described in the accreditation record rather than on the university's own facility pages, and it is larger than the city address suggests. The peer team recorded the university as spread over 608 acres across three campuses, with smart classrooms in many departments, computer and language laboratories, a greenhouse, a botanical garden, departmental libraries, a herbarium, museums of geology, zoology and history, seminar halls with projection, campus-wide WiFi at a bandwidth of 1 GBPS, an auditorium seating 1200, a gymnasium, an indoor stadium and a yoga centre open to people outside the university.

Accessibility is documented twice, at two different scales, and only one of the two is measured. The peer team describes a campus-wide provision: ramps on most buildings, wheelchairs, installed elevators, separate functional washrooms, and screen-reader software with a Seika Braille display and a Basic-D Braille embosser running a DBT Braille translator for blind students. The pharmacy department's own return answers the same questions as a proportion of its own buildings and puts both lifts or ramps and specially designed toilets at more than 80%. A candidate with a mobility need therefore has a described estate for the university and a measured proportion for one department, so the block they would actually study in is still worth asking about by name.

The spending behind those laboratories has been falling. Capital spending on new laboratory equipment in the department ran at Rs 43,32,681 in 2021-22, Rs 36,14,900 in 2022-23 and Rs 15,98,200 in 2023-24, while the library line stayed under a lakh throughout at Rs 15,000, Rs 88,909 and Rs 75,500. A candidate choosing a laboratory-heavy degree here is choosing a department whose equipment budget in the latest reported year was roughly a third of what it was two years earlier.

Two of the research centres on the campus were set up by bodies outside the university and are funded from outside it. A Women's Study Centre sponsored by the University Grants Commission and a Population Research Centre supported by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare both operate here, and the University Grants Commission has recognised the botany, geology, physics and zoology departments under its Special Assistance Programme, with the Department of Science and Technology supporting science departments under FIST. The shared services are described in the same accreditation papers rather than on the site's own pages, where the Central Library page carries an in-charge's contact and no collection figure. The figure exists elsewhere: the university's self-study report puts the library at more than 6 lakh books, 23450 Ph.D. theses and 8965 e-journals, alongside central instrumentation laboratories in several departments, a geological museum and a drug museum. A candidate who wants that number will find it in the accreditation file and not on the library page.

Residence at MLSU is allocated hostel by hostel, and most of the hostels are earmarked. The chief warden's notice lists six, with the places counted against each: the Maharshi Dayanand Saraswati Kanya Chhatravas on the university campus for Scheduled Tribe women, 150; the Gargi Kanya Chhatravas on the science college campus for women, 147; the Rana Punja Janjati Chhatravas on the university campus for Scheduled Tribe men, 92; the Vidhi Chhatravas on the university campus for men of every faculty, 70; Nehru Shikshak Sadan at Hiran Magri Sector 3 for Scheduled Tribe men, 40; and the Dr. D.S. Kothari Chhatravas on the university sports campus for research scholars, 18. Read the earmarks off that list and a general-category woman has one hostel open to her and a general-category man has one, which is a smaller campus than the six-hostel headline suggests.

The shortage is not a reader's inference, and the accreditation record puts a size on it. The peer team counted five hostels, two of them for girls, noted that not all of them have a mess, listed insufficient hostel accommodation among the university's weaknesses and recommended that it be increased because about 30% of applicants do not get a place. Anyone planning to live in Udaipur rather than commute should settle that before settling the course.

Charges are billed once for the year and split between a university fund covering admission, room rent, electricity, fan and water and a local fund covering hostel development, the common room, utensils and refundable caution money. On a course that is not self-financed the annual-scheme total is Rs 11,700 for a single-seated room and Rs 10,200 for a double, rising to Rs 13,450 and Rs 11,650 on the semester scheme; the self-financed courses pay Rs 16,700 and Rs 14,200 on the annual scheme and Rs 19,350 and Rs 16,350 on the semester one. Research scholars are billed on a scale of their own that runs the opposite way to intuition: a scholar drawing a UGC or government fellowship pays Rs 38,900 for a single room, while a scholar drawing no assistance at all pays Rs 19,450 for the same room. Undergraduate and postgraduate residents in arts, commerce and science may stay a maximum of five academic sessions, six where law is taken with a bachelor's degree.

Hostel applications run through the same admission portal as academic admission, whose notification feed carries the hostel form and its date extensions. Admission to a hostel is stated in the rules to be a matter of allotment by the warden, not a right that follows admission to a course. The chief warden's office sits beside the Swami Vivekanand auditorium on the university campus and takes queries on 0294-2471505 and 2471506 or at chiefwarden@mlsu.ac.in.

Pharmacy is the department whose staffing can be read two ways, off its own page and off its NIRF return, and the two do not quite agree. The department says it has 12 well-qualified teachers across pharmaceutics, pharmaceutical chemistry, pharmacology and pharmacognosy, that the department has published more than 250 papers, and that about 30 students have graduated with a doctoral degree from it; Prof. Manoj Kumar Jain heads it, Dr. Lalit Singh Chouhan is its other professor, and the rest of the bench are assistant professors. Its NIRF return for the same period entered 14 faculty records, the difference being staff who joined or left inside the reporting window.

Research supervision is substantial across the university and modest inside any one department. The peer team recorded 1408 students enrolled for the Ph.D. programme during the assessment period, of whom 576 held a JRF or SRF, and 147 research projects of which 20 were departmental, while noting that seed money for research is yet to be provided and that faculty class-load and limited departmental infrastructure constrain output. Pharmacy's share of that was 24 full-time doctoral students in progress, with four completing in each of the two years before its filing and none in the final reported year. Doctoral admission is run department by department rather than centrally, and the portal carries a separate eligible-and-not-eligible list and its own interview schedule for each subject that takes Ph.D. candidates.

A campus-wide count does exist, but it is filed in the accreditation papers rather than published on the academic pages. The NAAC peer team recorded 215 permanent faculty members and 612 permanent support staff against 14,334 students, and it asked the university to fill its vacant teaching and non-teaching posts on priority. The departmental pages on the university's own site carry staff lists and not that total, so the ratio has to be read out of the accreditation record instead.

MLSU points its graduates at an administrative directory, not at a hall of fame. Its alumni page filters by faculty, department and course and returns a coordinator to contact in each one, which is a routing table for graduates rather than a record of them.

The one place the university's alumni are described rather than routed is the accreditation record, and it describes them as donors. The peer team named a strong alumni base and engagement among the university's strengths, recorded that the Alumni Association was constituted in 2010 with some departments running their own, that many gold medals for university toppers are sponsored by alumni, and that alumni contributed significantly to infrastructure in the Jainology and Prakrit department. Not one of them is named there.

The closest thing to a distinguished-alumni feature anywhere on the site is a photo set headed Top Alumni on the pharmacy department's page, and it names nobody in text either. We could not find a list of notable alumni published by the university, so no graduate is named here as one. Where a public figure's own record names Mohanlal Sukhadia University, that record is the thing to check rather than a list compiled elsewhere.

MLSU runs two notice feeds, they do not carry the same items, and that is how an applicant here misses a date.

The university site's General Notifications page is the short one, holding only a handful of current items at a time. In the first week of September 2026 those were an MCA direct admission notice, an extension of the last date for admission to the postgraduate science subjects, Ph.D. interview notices for individual departments, a hostel form extension and the engineering spot-admission merit lists.

The admission portal's feed is the long one, and it mixes admission with examination: entrance answer keys, revised keys, allotment rounds and seat matrices sit in the same stream as examination time tables, postponed-examination orders and practical batch lists. The engineering spot-admission lists appear on the university feed and not on the portal, while the M.Pharm notification appears on the portal and on the department's own page. Reading only one of the three is how a notice gets missed.

The campus sits inside Udaipur city, and MLSU publishes a call-centre helpline alongside the mailboxes of the officers who actually decide things.

The helpline call centre runs from 10:00 AM to 1:30 PM and 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM daily except Sundays and national holidays, and it registers grievances about examinations and results against a registration number the caller can then use to track the complaint. For an examination or result problem that is the route that produces a paper trail; email to the controller's office does not.

At a glance

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