National Institute Of Pharmaceutical Education And Research Hajipur

NIPER Hajipur entered the government's Pharmacy ranking at 75 and now stands at 30, the biggest move any of the seven NIPERs has made in that table. For its first eleven years it did not run itself: a medical research institute in Patna held the academic and administrative reins until the end of October 2018, and a regular Director took charge only after that.

The grid it took into the last counselling is the other thing that separates it. Seven disciplines share 112 seats, five of them carry a block that pays no fellowship at an identical fee, and Medicinal Chemistry, the subject almost every pharmaceutical institute opens with, is not taught here at all.

The institute was set up in 2007 in the Export Promotion Industrial Park at Hajipur, in Vaishali district, and spent its formative years leaning on somebody else's administration. The ICMR-Rajendra Memorial Research Institute of Medical Sciences at Patna acted as its mentor institute, supplying academic and administrative support until 31 October 2018, and a regular Director took charge on 1 November 2018, on the institute's about page. Institute of National Importance standing arrived in 2021, under the NIPER (Amendment) Act of that year, fourteen years after the campus opened its doors and in the same stroke that covered its five 2007 siblings; only Mohali, the original institute, had carried the status before. Read the timeline before you read the ranking, because most of what this campus has published about itself dates from after 2018.

Bihar barely uses the institute it hosts. Its last ranking return puts 205 students on the two year postgraduate roll, 120 men and 85 women, of whom 6 gave an address inside Bihar, 199 came from elsewhere in India and none from abroad, in the NIRF 2025 data submission. A further 56 full time doctoral scholars sit behind them. A single national entrance test thins the home intake at every NIPER, but the local arithmetic here is stark: a candidate from Patna who takes a seat joins a two year roll carrying five other people who gave a Bihar address.

What the institute says it has produced since it opened is countable and modest. It has awarded 746 postgraduate and 34 doctoral degrees, recorded 690 publications, 26 memoranda of understanding and 14 patents, and holds 10 extramural research grants worth ₹469.25 lakhs from bodies including ICMR, DST-SERB and the Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative, in the NIPER JEE 2026 Masters information brochure. Twenty two taught degrees have left this campus for every doctorate, which is the ratio to hold in mind if you are treating a masters here as the front half of a research career.

Seven disciplines admitted here in the last counselling round, and the qualifying degree in your hand decides how many of the seven you can even apply to. Four are awarded as a master of science in pharmacy, one as a master of pharmacy and two as a master of technology. Two of the seven are new arrivals, and the institute says so itself: it describes a pharmaceutical quality and regulatory science programme as newly introduced and Biopharmaceuticals as restarted from the 2026-27 session, in the NIPER JEE 2026 Masters information brochure.

Two lines on that grid belong to Hajipur and to nowhere else. Pharmaceutical Regulatory Sciences carries a tick against this campus alone in the funded availability table of the Masters information brochure, and the brochure describes an unusual shape for it: the second year is delivered entirely at an industry site, through project work or an internship with a mentor from a pharmaceutical company's regulatory affairs division. M.Pharm. Pharmacy Practice runs at Guwahati, Hajipur and Mohali, and Hajipur is the only one of the three that puts any of it in the unfunded column, in the same brochure's availability tables.

How new the regulatory programme is shows in the fact that its name has not settled. The availability table calls it Pharmaceutical Regulatory Sciences, the departmental write-up a few pages earlier in the same brochure heads it Pharmaceutical Quality Science and then describes an M.S. (Pharm.) in Pharmaceutical Quality and Regulatory Science, and the counselling grid prints Science in the singular. Get the exact title of the degree you are being offered in writing, because that is the title that will appear on the certificate.

Something else is missing from that list, and it is the subject most people assume a pharmaceutical institute must teach. Medicinal Chemistry is ticked for six of the seven NIPERs in the funded table and for two in the unfunded one, and Hajipur appears in neither, in the Masters information brochure. Natural Products, Pharmacoinformatics, Medical Devices and the M.B.A. (Pharm.) are absent here as well. If synthetic chemistry is what you want to do, this campus is not on your preference list at all.

Nothing about the money is decided in Vaishali either. Every NIPER bills against a single national schedule, and the only thing that moves between the three columns below is who is paying, not which campus you attend.

More than half the one time block comes back to you. Of the ₹48,496, a refundable security amount of ₹27,500 is returned when you leave, and the rest is an admission fee of ₹5,000, an alumni fund contribution of ₹8,500, a placement fee of ₹4,000 and hostel admission of ₹3,496, itemised in section 4.1.1 of the Masters information brochure. Tuition of ₹26,022 a semester is the single head that falls to nil under SC or ST reservation. Three further heads carry an asterisk instead of an explanation, and the asterisk means you can decline them by declining a room: hostel admission at ₹3,496 once, then hostel rent at ₹4,593 and electricity at ₹5,500 in every semester.

Anyone admitted here as a foreign national leaves the rupee table altogether. Section 4.1.3 of the same brochure prices that seat at 2500 US dollars on entry and 1300 in every later semester, keeps mess charges outside both figures, and refuses to classify the candidate as a non-hosteller even where no room is taken.

Doctoral study is priced on its own line, and almost all of the extra lands on laboratory access. The laboratory head is ₹22,960 a semester and hostel rent ₹7,654, tuition holds at ₹26,022, and the bill comes to ₹1,22,367 before admission and ₹71,705 in each later semester, or ₹96,345 and ₹45,683 where tuition is nil, in the NIPER JEE 2026 Ph.D. information brochure. Both of those first two heads are close to double what a taught student pays, ₹11,483 for the laboratory and ₹4,593 for the room, in section 4.1.1 of the Masters information brochure. Thesis evaluation is charged separately at submission, and that brochure does not say how much.

Getting a Hajipur seat is a Punjab decision. Hajipur neither writes the entrance paper nor decides who clears it: that work belongs to the NIPER JEE office at Mohali, which also ran all four counselling phases of the 2026 cycle, per the NIPER JEE 2026 Masters information brochure, leaving this campus to appear on your form as a preference and nothing else. Its own admission page states the route in one line, that admission runs on GPAT followed by the joint entrance examination, then turns to the forms, rules and reporting schedule that follow an allotment letter.

Before the entrance score counts for anything, a marksheet and a scorecard have to clear, and the scorecard requirement lapses for a set of graduates who matter unusually much on this grid.

The scorecard waiver pays off unusually well here, because two of the seven Hajipur disciplines were written to take medical and veterinary graduates. Pharmacology and Toxicology admits B.V.Sc. and M.B.B.S. holders, and Pharmaceutical Regulatory Sciences adds B.D.S. alongside engineering and science graduates, in section 2.1 of the Masters information brochure. A doctor or a dentist can therefore reach this campus with no fellowship scorecard at all. An engineer, by contrast, reaches exactly three of the seven doors, and only through biotechnology, biomedical or chemical engineering.

Everybody who arrives sits the same paper, and two fifths of it is not about pharmacy. Section A puts 80 questions on general English, aptitude, reasoning and general knowledge, Section B puts 120 mainly on the undergraduate pharmacy syllabus, scoring runs 0.5 for a right answer against 0.125 lost for a wrong one across 150 minutes without a break, and the whole thing is one common paper for all seven campuses, in the Masters information brochure. A doctor or a dentist walking into a Hajipur seat through the scorecard waiver still has to answer that pharmacy half. Applying cost ₹4,000, or ₹2,000 under SC and ST reservation. In the 2026 cycle the application window ran from 16 April to 23 May 2026, with a correction window on 25 and 26 May, hall tickets from 8 June and the computer based test on 13 June 2026, in section 3.1 of the same brochure.

What Hajipur runs itself is the paperwork after allotment, and it publishes the whole schedule. Newly admitted M.S. (Pharm.), M.Pharm., M.Tech. and Ph.D. students in all seven disciplines were told to report physically for document verification between 5 and 7 August 2026, with orientation from 10 to 12 August and classes starting on 13 August, in the institute's schedule and instructions for newly enrolled students. Two of the nineteen documents on that verification list are undertakings to be printed on ₹50 non-judicial stamp paper and notarised: one on ragging, and one headed as a declaration on the return of fellowship. The second is the paperwork behind the money, and it is worth reading before you sign it rather than at the registration desk.

Doctoral candidates carry one extra stage, and it is not held here. Fifteen per cent of the doctoral score comes from an interview, against 85% for the written paper, and that interview is conducted in person at NIPER Mohali by panels organised into four subject groups, Chemical Sciences, Biological Sciences, Pharmaceutical Sciences and Medical Devices, in the NIPER JEE 2026 Ph.D. information brochure. A Biopharmaceuticals applicant to this campus is therefore judged by a Biological Sciences panel sitting in Punjab, and can arrive in Vaishali without having met anybody who works there.

No closing rank exists for this campus. NIPER JEE produces a single national merit list, allotment runs against it phase by phase, and neither Mohali nor Vaishali publishes the rank at which any queue ran out. The evidence that does exist is better than an estimate anyway, because this institute stayed on the vacancy sheets from the first round to the last.

One line in the middle row moves the wrong way, and it is the funded one. Pharmacy Practice showed 6 empty fellowship seats before phase II and 8 before phase III, on the phase II and phase III sheets. A vacancy count that rises between rounds means students who had already taken those places gave them up for something they preferred, and Pharmacy Practice was still the largest open block when the fourth and final phase opened.

Then the national rounds ended and the seats had not. On 19 August 2026 the institute issued a spot counselling notice of its own, covering six disciplines in the funded column and four in the unfunded one, with 4 fellowship places and 2 unfunded ones still showing in M.Pharm. Pharmacy Practice, 3 in M.Tech. Biopharmaceuticals and 2 doctoral places in Pharmaceutical Analysis, in its public notice for spot counselling. Pharmacology and Toxicology was the one discipline with nothing left on a fellowship. Applications went by email to the dean's office and through a Google form, closing on 23 August 2026, and were open only to candidates who had not taken a seat at any NIPER in the 2026 cycle. A doctoral place reaching a spot round is the part to notice: if you hold a NIPER JEE rank and no seat, watching this institute's notice board in August is a real strategy rather than a long shot.

Two of every three students who finished on time in 2023-24 were placed, 63 of 91, and the middle one of those 63 was paid ₹4,90,000, with 15 more leaving for further study, in the institute's NIRF 2025 data submission. Read those two figures as a pair. A median tells you where the middle offer sat and nothing about the third of the class that had no offer at all.

The placed share improved faster than the pay did. It went from 28 of 51 to 63 of 91 across three cycles while the median moved from ₹4,05,480 to ₹4,90,000, in the same filing. Close to seven leavers in ten now find work, against a shade over five in ten three years earlier, and the middle offer has risen by less than a lakh across the same stretch.

One published claim sits well above all of that. The institute states in the national admission brochure that it achieved about 95% placements for the graduated batch of 2025, in the Masters information brochure, and adds that a significant number of its masters scholars have gone on to research positions in the USA, Europe and Indian national laboratories including CSIR-IICB, CSIR-IICT, the IITs, NISER, PGIMER, IISc and AIIMS. The most recent year any ranking filing covers is 2023-24, where 63 of the 91 who finished on time were placed, in the NIRF 2025 data submission, so the two numbers describe different cohorts and neither document lets you reconcile them. Treat the filing as the figure you can check.

What the placement cell does publish is employers rather than outcomes, and it publishes them in a PDF rather than on a page. Its placement statistics page carries no table, no year and no figure, and the Our Recruiters page under the same menu renders empty, but the placement brochure linked beside them closes with a Past Recruiters wall of company logos, among them Serum Institute of India, Bharat Biotech, Intas, Mankind, Hetero, Viatris, Zuventus Healthcare, Granules, Shilpa Biologicals, Ferring and Daicel Chiral Technologies. Logos are not counts. Nobody at this institute publishes how many of its graduates any of those firms took, or in which year.

Twelve blocks, not seven, is how allotment actually works here. The fellowship split cuts five of the disciplines in two, category reservation is then applied separately inside each half, and a funded Pharmaceutics place and an unfunded one are two different queues that happen to award the same degree for the same money.

Every block outside the fellowship column is unreserved bar one place. Four of the five unfunded blocks carry nothing but unreserved seats, and the fifth, Pharmacology and Toxicology, carries 4 unreserved and 1 OBC, with no SC, ST or EWS seat anywhere outside the funded columns, in the same matrix. A reserved category candidate is therefore competing only for funded places here, which is the opposite of what an unfunded block usually does to a queue. Four more places for candidates with benchmark disabilities sit above the whole grid rather than inside it, and all four are funded, in the same document. Above the 112 sit quotas Hajipur does not set: an extra 5% for candidates sponsored by government departments, research and development organisations, public sector undertakings or reputed private pharmaceutical enterprises, an extra 5% for foreign nationals and for OCI or PIO cardholders whose card was issued on or after 4 March 2021, and a floor of not less than 3% for benchmark disabilities, all in the Masters information brochure.

Doctoral intake is small and it does not mirror the taught list. The 2026 round gave Hajipur 10 institute funded doctoral seats, 4 in Pharmaceutical Analysis, 2 each in Pharmacy Practice and Biopharmaceuticals and 1 each in Pharmacology and Toxicology and Biotechnology, plus 2 project funded places in Pharmacology and Toxicology attached to a four year project, in the NIPER JEE 2026 Ph.D. seat matrix. Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Regulatory Sciences took no doctoral seat through the entrance test that year, which matters if you are choosing a masters as the first half of a longer stay. Four years is the longest term carried by any project funded doctoral seat in that document, matched only by a 48 month place at Mohali, so the money behind those two Hajipur seats runs longer than the money behind most of the system's.

Two different numbers describe the size of this campus and they answer different questions. The ranking return files a sanctioned postgraduate intake of 114 for 2023-24, up from 91 the year before, in the NIRF 2025 data submission, while the grid handed to candidates two cycles later carried 112, in the seat matrix. The first is a permission granted to the institute. The second is the list you can actually put preferences against.

Thirtieth, on 58.44, in the 2025 Pharmacy table published by the National Institutional Ranking Framework. The position matters less here than the direction of travel behind it.

The first row is not a gap in the record. No entry for this institute appears anywhere in the 2021 Pharmacy table, which ran to 75 places and carried all six of its sibling campuses, and no institution in Bihar appears in it either. Its first appearance was at 75 in 2022, and its own director sets out the sequence that followed, 75 to 44 to 33 and then into the top 30, on the institute's home page. Four appearances, four improvements, and a 45 place gain no other NIPER has matched on this table.

Research alone carried the most recent edition. Research and professional practice stands at 37.04 in 2025 against 27.39 in 2024, and perception at 32.43 against 30.25. Everything else slipped: teaching to 81.05 from 83.79, graduation outcomes to 70.21 from 71.06, outreach to 57.44 from 58.02. An overall score that rises while three of five parameters fall tells you how heavily one gain was weighted, and it is the honest caveat to attach to the climb.

Perception is the parameter that has never recovered. It stood at 43.40 in the institute's first appearance in 2022, fell to 26.46 in 2023 and has climbed back only to 32.43 in 2025, still eleven points below where it started. Every other parameter on this table can be moved by what an institute files. Standing among academics, employers and the public is the one that cannot, and on this campus it is the only score that is worse than it was on day one.

Three of this institute's own publications give three different answers to how many departments it has. The departments page names six: Pharmaceutical Regulatory Sciences, Biotechnology, Pharmacy Practice, Pharmacology and Toxicology, Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Analysis. The 2025-26 placement brochure states five, leaving Pharmaceutical Regulatory Sciences out. Counselling then opened seven disciplines. The seventh, M.Tech. Biopharmaceuticals, carried 15 funded places in the seat matrix and has no department page, no named head and no faculty list anywhere on the site. If that is the allotment you are offered, get the department, the supervisor and the laboratory confirmed in writing before you accept it.

The oldest departments date themselves on the home page: Pharmacology and Toxicology was established on 16 September 2008, and Biotechnology has offered a masters since 2010 and a doctorate since 2014. What each department works on is set out at length in one place only, and it is a national document rather than an institute one. The Masters information brochure describes Biotechnology as working on recombinant DNA technology, stem cell biology and disease models in cancer, neurodegeneration, leishmaniasis and rare diseases, with training in organoids, spheroids and organ on a chip; Pharmaceutical Analysis on mass spectrometry based proteomics and metabolomics, impurity and genotoxicity profiling and phytochemical standardisation; Pharmaceutics on complex dosage forms, pharmacokinetic modelling and nano enabled delivery; and Biopharmaceuticals on monoclonal antibodies, biosimilars, recombinant proteins and vaccines, including phage and yeast surface display. Leishmaniasis appears in that list for a reason: it is endemic to the districts around this campus.

A third name floats through the site without a department page behind it. The central animal research facility page says a Regulatory Toxicology department has recently been introduced, the photo gallery files student achievement albums under Department of Regulatory Toxicology, and the director's message lists Regulatory Toxicology among the institute's disciplines, while the departments menu names Pharmaceutical Regulatory Sciences and the counselling grid offers no Regulatory Toxicology seat at Hajipur at all. The institute's own about page is a cycle behind all of it, listing four programme pairs for 2024-25 and omitting Biotechnology, Biopharmaceuticals and the regulatory programme entirely, and its examination page publishes schedules for an integrated postgraduate and doctoral batch running from 2023 to 2029 that appears in no admission document. Read the counselling matrix, not the website, for what is actually on offer.

The clearest thing this institute publishes about its own capacity is a price list. Its Central Instrumentation Facility sells time on sixteen instruments at three tiers, one for academic and research users, one for start ups and MSMEs and one for industry, with GST charged on top, on its instrumentation facility page. A start up rate pitched between the academic and industrial ones is unusual, and it tells you who this campus expects to walk in with samples.

Around that sit the facilities a research masters actually lives in. The animal facility page describes individually ventilated cages, cage change stations, an anaesthesia machine, a resident veterinary officer, controlled access and CCTV, with each species housed in a separate room and a quarantine area kept free of noise and social stress; the national brochure adds that the building is single level, built to CCSEA requirements, with surgical suites for recovery and non-recovery procedures and a spread of mazes for behavioural work, in the Masters information brochure. The library holds 1,840 books, 482 theses and dissertations, 107 CD-ROMs, 22 bound volumes of journals and more than 200 e-journals, with a public catalogue of its own. A medical centre runs an outpatient service for students, employees and their dependants under a named medical officer.

The one facility being built rather than used is the biggest. The Department of Pharmaceuticals has funded a Centre of Excellence in Biological Therapeutics here under its PRIP scheme, to function as a separate entity working on cost effective biosimilars, monoclonal antibodies, therapeutic enzymes and peptides with industry partners, in the Masters information brochure. The institute signed a memorandum with Sun Pharmaceutical Industries for that centre on 25 November 2025, on its collaborations page, and its notice board tracks the build rather than the science: a recruitment window for centre personnel that closed on 3 July 2026, and a tender for the centre's split air conditioning issued on 14 August 2026, both on the home page. If the biologics centre is what draws you here, ask what is running today.

The accounts show a campus that finished a hardware phase and started a grant phase. Spending on new laboratory equipment ran ₹13,04,17,665 in 2021-22, ₹8,55,79,472 in 2022-23 and ₹8,71,10,837 in 2023-24, while library capital spending climbed from ₹13,56,553 to ₹50,21,804 and then ₹1,01,74,294 over the same three years, in the NIRF 2025 data submission. Sponsored research went from a single project worth ₹9,29,060 to 7 projects worth ₹55,56,495 across those three years, and consultancy from 1 client to 7 over the same period. That filing also gives the top available answer to three questions on disability access, putting lifts or ramps and specially designed toilets in more than 80% of buildings and confirming walking aids and movement between blocks. Check what those percentages describe before you rely on them: an academic and administrative block, an auditorium and a 150 capacity girls' hostel were all listed as under construction or nearing completion by the director on the home page.

Rooms are allotted after you arrive, not with the offer. Accommodation is provided in the boys' and girls' hostels on a sharing basis subject to availability, rooms are allotted only once physical reporting and document verification are complete, and no accommodation is provided for parents or family members who travel with a student for reporting, in the institute's schedule and instructions for newly enrolled students.

The rules themselves were rewritten on 3 August 2026 and they are stricter than most.

The daytime clause is the one that surprises people, and it comes paired with a second: the same rule bars students from staying in the laboratory beyond permitted hours without approval. A hostel you cannot sit in during working hours, attached to a laboratory you cannot sit in after them, is a campus that expects you somewhere specific all day, and it fits an institute whose whole intake is a research degree. Note also that the institute's own hostels page publishes none of this: it renders unprocessed page builder code and a postal address, so the rules document linked from the admission page is the only place the terms actually appear.

Fourteen teachers are named on the institute's faculty page, spread across five departments, and exactly one of them holds a full professorship. Biotechnology, Pharmacology and Toxicology, Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Analysis have three each and Pharmacy Practice has two. The NIRF 2025 return entered 25 faculty members, in the data submission, against 205 masters students and 56 full time doctoral scholars in the same document, so read the filing for the working number and the website for who is actually named.

The last row is not a formatting slip. Pharmaceutical Regulatory Sciences has a department page in the menu and 10 funded seats in the 2026 seat matrix, and no teacher appears under it on the faculty page. The brochure's answer is that the programme's second year is delivered at an industry site with mentors drawn from the regulatory affairs divisions of pharmaceutical companies, in the Masters information brochure. Ask which named person on this campus will teach the first year and supervise the project.

The same small bench also runs the administration. Dr. Abhishek Sahu of Biotechnology holds charge as Registrar and Dr. Vinod L. Gaikwad of Pharmaceutics is Deputy Registrar for Examinations, on the faculty page, and Dr. Gaikwad took that examinations post from Dr. P. Ramalingam, who held it from 2021 to 2025, on the examination page. Grant income is concentrated in the same way: of the nine ongoing projects listed on the research grants page, three belong to Dr. P. Ramalingam, including the two largest at ₹130 lakh and ₹79.75 lakh from ICMR's extramural scheme, both running from 2024 to 2027. A ₹60 lakh DST project on rare diseases from 2023 to 2026 is the only one with four investigators on it.

Track down somebody who studied here and the institute's own site will be no help. Its alumni page offers a link to a separate portal and photographs of a hybrid alumni meeting held on 26 January 2026, and behind that there is no directory, no batch roll, no office bearer and not one name.

What the record does carry is throughput, and the doctoral half of it is thin. Since it opened, the institute has awarded 746 postgraduate degrees and 34 doctorates, per the Masters information brochure. Full time doctoral completions ran 3 in 2021-22, 3 in 2022-23 and 2 in 2023-24 against 56 scholars on the roll, in the NIRF 2025 data submission. Two or three completions a year from a doctoral school that size is the number to put to a prospective supervisor, along with how many theses that individual has carried to submission.

Collaboration announcements dominated the middle of 2026. ICMR's National Institute for Research in Tuberculosis at Chennai signed a memorandum with the institute on 16 July 2026, and WaldHealth Care Private Limited of Baddi followed on 24 July 2026, both announced on the home page. Earlier in the year the campus hosted a Distinguished Expert Seminar on Biological Therapeutics on 23 and 24 March 2026, and an expert talk on Huntingtin protein spread by a speaker from Florida Atlantic University on 31 July 2026, both in its photo gallery.

The tender and recruitment boards say more about the state of the place than the events do. Between 20 July and 20 August 2026 the institute invited bids for housekeeping material, for an interactive panel and internet connectivity, for a split air conditioner for the Centre of Excellence and twice for student mess catering, the first of those cancelled on 3 August and reissued on 14 August, on the home page. Over the same weeks it published the eligibility status for teaching posts advertised under an employment notification dated 19 February 2026, and advertised project research scientist and project technical support positions. A campus retendering its mess and still working through a teaching recruitment in August is a campus in the middle of building out.

Bihar's ranked pharmacy sector is two institutions, and this is the higher placed of them.

Nothing else from the state appears in that table, and the other entry is a central university at Gaya, in the south of Bihar. Set that against the 6 in state students among the 205 on the roll in the NIRF 2025 data submission and a strange picture emerges: the highest ranked pharmacy address in Bihar is filled almost entirely by people from elsewhere.

Set beside its six namesakes, most of the usual comparison points collapse. The paper is the same paper, the fee schedule the same schedule, the ₹12,400 stipend the same stipend. Only the contents of each grid differ.

Two of those rows are the whole argument for choosing Hajipur, and they point in opposite directions from the ranking. If you want to study pharmacy regulation inside a NIPER on a stipend, this is the only address in the country, and the second year of that degree is spent in industry rather than on campus. If you want clinical pharmacy on a seat that pays nothing but leaves you free of the fellowship conditions, this is again the only address. For anything built on synthetic chemistry, natural products, medical devices or management, the choice is made elsewhere before the ranking table gets a say.

Write to the right office and you will get an answer; write to the wrong one and you will get a redirect to Punjab. Nothing about the entrance test, the merit list or a national counselling phase is settled at any of the desks below. Reporting, hostel allocation, examinations, spot counselling and doctoral queries all are.

Getting there is easier than the postal address suggests, because Patna is next door.

Hajipur Junction is the headquarters of the East Central Railway, with direct services to Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Guwahati, Lucknow and Varanasi, and the town is joined to Patna by the Mahatma Gandhi Setu and the JP Setu, on the institute's contact page. The working geography is Patna's rather than Hajipur's: of the collaborations on the memoranda page, the clinical ones run to Mahavir Cancer Sansthan, the Indira Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, Mediversal Hospital, Daksh Heart Care Centre and the Government Tibbi College and Hospital, all in Patna, alongside Sadar Hospital in Hajipur itself and the same RMRIMS that once managed the institute. For a clinical pharmacy or pharmacology project, that list is the real asset on this campus.

At a glance

Quick facts