Professor Jayashankar Telangana Agricultural University (pjtau)

PJTAU's examinations wing publishes the last rank it actually admitted in 2025-26, in almost every social category, split three ways by what claim the family can make on the land. On the open list, B.Sc. (Hons.) Agriculture closed at 4277 for a candidate with no farm claim and at 10797 for an agriculture labourer's child. Two things decide a seat at Rajendranagar: a Telangana EAPCET rank, and, for the farm quotas, a certificate a Tahsildar has to sign.

The University dates from 2014 and its lead campus does not. Teaching at Rajendranagar goes back to 1955, when Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan inaugurated the Agricultural College there, and the college itself records an earlier start, established in 1946 under Osmania University. Everything above it came later.

The parent university arrived a decade after that. Expert committees pressed for farm universities that would hold teaching, research and extension in one institution, and that vision produced the Andhra Pradesh Agricultural University in 1964, into which the Rajendranagar college was folded. That university was renamed Acharya N.G. Ranga Agricultural University in 1996. When Andhra Pradesh was divided, PJTAU was established in 2014 to serve the farming community of Telangana, taking the Rajendranagar estate with it while ANGRAU continued in the residual state.

The name changed once more, recently enough that the University has not finished changing it on its own site. It was set up as Professor Jayashankar Telangana State Agricultural University and renamed Professor Jayashankar Telangana Agricultural University in 2024, yet the live eligibility page still sends B.Tech farmer-quota candidates to counselling "conducted by PJTSAU", and the library page still opens with "PJTSAU traces its roots to 1955". The two acronyms belong to one institution, and a search for either lands in the same place.

The undergraduate list is short and entirely agricultural. PJTAU teaches B.Sc. (Hons.) Agriculture, B.Sc. (Hons.) Community Science, B.Tech. (Agricultural Engineering) and B.Tech. (Food Technology), each with its own list of permitted Intermediate subject combinations. A fifth degree is missing from most listings of this University: B.Sc. (Hons.) Horticulture, taught at Agricultural College, Aswaraopet with an intake of 30, which shares the Bi.P.C. application form and the EAPCET agriculture-stream merit list with B.Sc. (Hons.) Agriculture. Agriculture is taught at colleges spread across the state, at Rajendranagar and Warangal and at Aswaraopet, Jagtial, Palem, Sircilla, Adilabad, Dichpally, Kodangal and Huzurnagar; community science only at Saifabad in Hyderabad; agricultural engineering only at Kandi; food technology only at Rudrur.

Postgraduate teaching opens the discipline count up. The University offers M.Sc. (Ag.) in 13 disciplines and an MBA in Agribusiness Management, postgraduate degrees in five community science disciplines and M.Tech in three, with doctoral programmes in all three faculties. Below the degrees sits a polytechnic layer that rarely appears on listing sites: a two-year Diploma in Agriculture, a two-year Diploma in Organic Agriculture and a three-year Diploma in Agricultural Engineering, taught after Class 10.

Fees are published notification by notification rather than in one table. The sheet annexed to the 2026-27 ICAR notification prices the undergraduate year like this.

Read the two smaller heads before you dismiss them. The Non-University Fund carries a study tour charge of Rs 1,650 a semester, collected for all eight semesters from AY 2026-27 onwards, with a quarter of the pooled money spent on visits inside Telangana and three quarters on tours outside the state. The University Fund carries a digitalization of examinations charge of Rs 1,430 a semester. Neither is optional and neither appears in a headline tuition figure.

The two B.Tech degrees are priced on an entirely separate sheet, and the gap between their regular and special quotas is the widest in the University's published fees.

A special-quota seat costs more and buys nothing extra. The same notification states that candidates admitted under the special quota are treated on par with regular students, receive no special amenities or facilities, and are not eligible for any fee reimbursement or educational concession offered by the Government, and that unfilled special-quota seats are kept vacant rather than released to another stream.

No engineering or medical national rank opens a seat here, but neither is there a single entrance either. Each degree has its own set of doors, and the University's eligibility table is the only place the four main ones are laid side by side. Horticulture is not in that table at all; it is admitted on the Telangana EAPCET-2026 agriculture-stream merit list, on the same Bi.P.C. form as B.Sc. (Hons.) Agriculture.

Which counselling desk you attend depends on the degree, and getting this wrong costs a seat. B.Sc. (Hons.) Agriculture and community science seats are allotted through offline, physical-mode counselling conducted by PJTAU. The two B.Tech degrees are split down the middle: 60% Non-Farmer quota seats are filled through online counselling conducted by the TG-EAPCET Convener, and 40% Farmer quota seats and all self-financing seats through offline physical-mode counselling conducted by the University. An engineering applicant who waits for a University call letter for a non-farmer seat is waiting at the wrong counter.

Two of the four degrees are not read off one Intermediate stream. Community science and food technology each split their intake, with 50% of the seats allotted to Bi.P.C candidates and the remaining 50% to M.P.C candidates, which is why a mathematics-stream candidate can reach food technology and a biology-stream candidate can reach it too. Agricultural engineering takes Physical Sciences and Mathematics only. Ties on the EAPCET list are broken first on the optional-subject marks in the qualifying examination and then, if the tie survives that, in favour of the older candidate.

Application is online only and priced by category. The University charges Rs 3,000 for the application and Rs 1,500 for SC, ST and physically challenged candidates. For AY 2026-27 the window ran from 28-06-2026, with registration payment closing 11-08-2026 and the filled-in application due 12-08-2026, and one correction day on 13-08-2026. Those dates have passed for the current cycle, and what remains on the University's admissions feed are walk-in counselling notifications for seats still unfilled, which is where a late applicant should be looking rather than at the closed portal.

The state roster is where most seats are settled, and it is unusually granular.

The OC line is not a reserved block: the same notification records that Open Competition includes all categories viz., OC, BC, SC-1. SC-II, SC-III & ST (by merit only). EWS is not carved out of that pool at all: both 2026-27 prospectuses print the roster without it and record that the 10 per cent reservation allocated to the EWS category is supernumerary to the total intake. Three further rules cut across the roster. Women hold a third of the seats in each course, horizontally reserved in favour of women candidates from each category. Local status decides most of the rest: 85 per cent of seats in each course are reserved for local candidates of the Osmania University area and 15 per cent are unreserved, under G.O. Ms. No. 15 of the Higher Education (TE) Department dated 27-02-2025. And the farm quotas sit on top as two named blocks, not one: for both B.Tech degrees the notification sets 25 per cent for the farmers' quota and 15 per cent for the agriculture labourers' quota, leaving its rural-quota column empty, and the Bi.P.C. prospectus repeats that same 25 and 15 for B.Sc. (Hons.) Agriculture, B.Sc. (Hons.) Horticulture and B.Tech. (Food Technology). A rural childhood on its own claims neither block; the land or the job card does.

Claiming a farm quota is a documents exercise, not a tick-box. The farmers' quota asks for a minimum of four years of schooling in non-municipal areas between Class 4 and Class 12, and ownership of not less than one acre of land in the name of the candidate, the parents or the grandparents, certified by the Tahsildar on a prescribed annexure. The agriculture labourers' quota is written as two alternative branches, both starting from four years in government schools or government residential schools: either an EGS job card in the name of the parents or the candidate and no agricultural land at all, or owning less than one acre without the job card. An annexure filled in without the Tahsildar's or the head of institution's signature and seal has the claim summarily rejected.

The ICAR door works on a different calendar, a different examination and a different counselling authority. Candidates provisionally selected under the 20 per cent ICAR quota through CUET (ICAR-UG) 2026 are re-allotted to PJTAU's constituent colleges on their CUET merit rank, the rule of reservation and the college preferences they submit through a Google Form. Only six of the agriculture colleges take them, and the notification names the seats at each.

That distance column is not decoration. An ICAR-quota candidate ranks the six by preference, and a rank that clears only Aswaraopet puts a Hyderabad-facing student 340 km from Rajendranagar for four years. The money arrives in two instalments on this route: the entrant has already paid Rs 10,000 as seat acceptance fee on the ICAR portal and pays the balance of Rs 53,990 in cash, by UPI or by card when reporting to the allotted college.

Postgraduate and doctoral entry runs almost entirely through ICAR. Admission is based on the ICAR PG-AIEEA entrance for master's programmes and ICAR AICE-SRF for the Ph.D, with a further 30 per cent of students admitted supernumerary under the ICAR quota and allotted by ICAR. Diploma entry is different again: candidates need a rank in TG-POLYCET under the agricultural stream, conducted by the State Board of Technical Education and Training, and 60 per cent of diploma seats are reserved for candidates who studied at least four years in non-municipal-area schools between Class 1 and Class 10. A diploma holder can then re-enter the degree stream through the University's own AGRICET and AGRIENGGCET entrance examinations.

The last rank admitted in each category for 2025-26 is published as a single sheet by the University's examinations wing. Every category splits three ways, and the sheet's own legend explains how: it pairs farmer and rural into one column and keeps agriculture labour in another, which is not how the counselling notifications name those quotas.

Two features of that sheet change how you read your own rank. In almost every row the farm columns close later than the open column, so the effective bar for a farmer's child is lower than the open number suggests, not higher. And the SC Group-I line is blank across all three columns. The sheet's own note explains that seats went unclaimed in some social categories across the counselling phases, were shifted under the reservation criteria and were refilled on TG-EAPCET merit, which is what a blank row records. A blank is a category that did not fill, not a category that closed at rank one.

The other three lists close far later, and the spread between them is wide.

Community science at Saifabad is the softest entry on an open rank. Food technology at Rudrur inverts the usual pattern: its farmer column closed at 7925 while its open column ran out to 60995, which happens when a small quota pool draws more qualified claimants than it has seats. Treat all of these as one year's outcome. The University itself warns that the ranks reflect who took part across the various phases of counselling and what vacancies existed at the time, so a rank that cleared in 2025-26 is a reference point rather than a promise.

Read the placement row against the higher-studies row: at undergraduate level the second is consistently the larger of the two.

In 2023-24, 497 of the 705 undergraduates who finished on time went on to further study while 177 were placed, so the recruiters took a clear minority of that batch. The master's cohort behaves the other way round: 99 of 174 postgraduates were placed in the same year against 61 going on to further study, at a median of Rs 5,70,000. Four years of B.Sc. (Hons.) Agriculture here usually ends in another classroom rather than an office, and the year the recruiters matter is the master's year.

Recruitment is organised college by college rather than centrally, and only one college names names. The Rajendranagar campus runs a Placement Cell that organizes career counselling, soft skills training, and industry collaborations, and names Godrej Agrovet, Syngenta, ITC, Mahyco, Coromandel Fertilizers, and Gharda Chemicals as recent recruiters. The outstation colleges list the cell without the recruiters, and what they put next to it is the giveaway: Warangal houses a JRF Preparation Cell alongside its Placement Cell, and Sircilla an active Placement Cell, JRF (Junior Research Fellowship) Cell. No campus-wide recruiter list and no highest-package figure is published for the University as a whole, and no constituent college page carries one either.

The undergraduate intake PJTAU is sanctioned for grew by more than half inside two years. The master's intake barely shifted.

No single category-wise sheet covers every college at once; the roster is worked out inside whichever counselling phase fills that seat. The course-wise intake, though, is printed in advance, in the prospectus for each Intermediate stream.

The special-quota column is where those intake figures stop being routine. The block on B.Sc. (Hons.) Agriculture is not a rounding error at 500 seats against 855 regular ones, which is why that quota carries a last-rank row of its own in the University's cutoff sheet. And the sanctioned number is not always the number counselled: the August farmers'-quota notification prints 8 special-quota seats at Kandi where the prospectus printed 9.

The polytechnic layer runs to 320 seats in the University's own polytechnics and 300 more in affiliated ones, and is counselled entirely separately.

At the flagship campus the number that matters most is the local one: College of Agriculture, Rajendranagar states an undergraduate intake of 382 students per year, against the 50 seats it sets aside there for the ICAR quota.

PJTAU is ranked in the Agriculture and Allied Sectors table, which is the discipline table a single-subject state university is measured in.

Teaching resources carry this rank and research does not. The University earns 82.31 on teaching, learning and resources and 18.22 on research and professional practice, and the distance between those two is the shape of the place: the estate, the staffing and the student ratios are strong, the publication and patent record is not. Perception, at 34.67, sits nearer the research end than the teaching end. An undergraduate is buying the heavy half of that scorecard, since it is what fills the classroom and the farm. A doctoral applicant should ignore the aggregate and read the sponsored-project record of the single department that would supervise the thesis.

The teaching departments follow the three faculties rather than the campuses.

Doctoral supervision does not track the master's list evenly. The doctoral page names its disciplines faculty by faculty: seven on the agriculture side, in agronomy, entomology, seed science and technology, genetics and plant breeding, plant pathology, agricultural extension education and agricultural economics; all five community science disciplines, from extension education and communication management through food and nutrition, resource management and consumer science, apparel and textile science and human development and family studies; and, on the engineering side, soil and water conservation engineering alone. The summary line at the top of the same page says 10 disciplines, which is not what the lists below it add up to, so write to the department rather than trusting either count. Agricultural engineering is the faculty to check hardest before committing to a research degree, because two of its three master's departments carry no doctoral programme at all.

At the flagship college the departmental numbers are smaller still. College of Agriculture, Rajendranagar carries M.Sc. (Ag.) across 11 disciplines with 157 students, and Ph.D. programmes in seven disciplines with 54 students.

The teaching sits at Rajendranagar and almost everything else sits somewhere else in Telangana. Extension reaches growers through 23 Telangana Rythu Vignana Kendras and 8 Krishi Vigyan Kendras, with the Extension Education Institute, the Agricultural Information and Communication Centre and Press, and the Electronic Wing listed at Rajendranagar, Hyderabad. The research output behind that network is substantial: the University records 215 farm-implementable technologies developed across natural resource management, crop protection, mechanization and value addition, alongside farm implements of its own design such as multi-crop threshers, groundnut pod strippers and laser-guided land levelers.

The teaching estate at Rajendranagar is documented in unusual detail. The college building holds 16 classrooms, 34 laboratories, and 5 interconnected academic blocks, with 12 smart classrooms, a virtual classroom, AR & VR lab and ICT-enabled seminar halls, and the farms behind it run to 113.6 ha at the College Farm and 53 ha at the Student Farm. Sport gets a university sports complex spread over 30 acres, with a 400 mts. Athletic Running Track with 8 lane and a 600 capacity sports gallery.

The library is the accumulated record of seven decades of work on Telangana's crops. Its Knowledge Management Centre holds 90,200 Books, 1,380 e-Books, 8,500 e-Journals, 11,405 Theses, 41 Print Journals, 11 Databases, running on Koha, with campus Knowledge Management Centres at the constituent colleges under the University Librarian's technical supervision.

The newest facility is the one that separates this campus from other state farm universities. The PJTAU Drone Academy sits on 1.3 acres at the Centre for Digital Agriculture & Technology, ARI, Rajendranagar, established at the end of 2023, and it is the first in the Telugu states among RPTOs and State Agricultural Universities in India to offer DGCA-approved dual certification for small and medium-category drone pilot training. It has trained a total of 520 remote pilots and holds a patent granted in 2024 for a multi nozzle aerial seed dispensing device, developed jointly with a Hyderabad drone firm.

Health cover is written into the fee sheet. The Rajendranagar health centre runs a 10 bedded hospital for primary care with a pathological lab, pharmacy and two ambulances, and the Students Health Care Scheme, charged at Rs 410 a semester on the fee sheet, has the University bear hospitalization expenses up to Rs 30,000 per student.

Hostels here are the default rather than a fallback, because most students joining the colleges of the University opt to stay in hostels, as a majority of them come from rural backgrounds. Room allocation follows the degree level: undergraduate students share rooms on a twin-sharing basis, while postgraduate students are provided with single rooms.

At every campus housing both, except Rudrur, the women's hostels hold more students than the men's, which follows the University's own enrolment: it filed 1226 male and 2204 female undergraduates, and 95 male and 284 female postgraduates in its 2025 ranking return. Rajendranagar runs 5 hostel blocks. The men's side is Haritha Nilayam, the one the table marks postgraduate, Krishi Nilayam, and two international student hostels; the women's side is the paired Vasantha Nilayam and Bheemaiah Shanthi Nilayam, 460 Rooms between them. Saifabad's Sneha Girls Hostel runs old and new buildings side by side.

Cost is billed separately from the degree. Boarders pay room rent of Rs 1,800 and establishment charges of Rs 6,000 per semester on top of the fee for non-boarders, and mess charges are extra again. A place is not automatic with admission either: the B.Tech notification states plainly that hostel facility shall be provided, subject to the availability of accommodation in the respective colleges.

The University entered 314 faculty members in its 2025 ranking-framework return, spread across its constituent colleges and research stations. At the Rajendranagar college alone the count is 57 faculty members, the majority being doctorates, assisted by 117 experienced non-teaching staff.

What those staff carry outside the classroom is the more useful signal for a research applicant. In 2023-24 the University ran 150 sponsored projects funded by 57 agencies, receiving Rs 86,92,90,408, alongside 113 consultancy projects for 49 client organizations. The two preceding years were far smaller: 129 projects and Rs 17,53,17,775 in 2022-23, and 73 projects and Rs 8,46,60,191 in 2021-22. Read the jump as a funding year rather than as a settled research base, particularly against the low research parameter in the same year's ranking. The doctoral register behind it holds 186 full-time scholars, with 49 completing in 2023-24.

The senior offices are held by working scientists. Prof. Aldas Janaiah is Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Balram Marathi is Director of Research and Dr M. Yakadri is Director of Extension, with individual faculty profiles published on the University's own faculty pages rather than through an external directory.

PJTAU keeps no notable-alumni register, and the calendar explains why. The University was constituted only in 2014, so anyone who took a degree at Rajendranagar before that holds it from the predecessor university under its Andhra Pradesh Agricultural University or Acharya N.G. Ranga Agricultural University name. A page that lists mid-century agricultural scientists as PJTAU alumni is reassigning them.

What the University itself profiles is recent and narrow. Its alumni page carries a talk by D. Raghu Vamsi of the 2021 batch, who secured first rank in the Entomology subject of ICAR-AIEEA (PG), delivered to third and final year students at Agricultural College, Warangal in September 2025. For a university whose undergraduates mostly continue to a master's, a national first rank in the ICAR postgraduate entrance is the outcome its own students are measured against.

Every admission, examination and fee query for the constituent colleges routes back to the Registrar's office at Rajendranagar: the Administrative Office, Professor Jayashankar Telangana Agricultural University, Rajendranagar, Hyderabad, Telangana 500 030.

Rajendranagar sits south-west of the city, and during an admission cycle the admission-side numbers answer faster than the general office line. The instructions to applicants direct queries to 040-24011854 between 10:30 AM to 4:30 PM on all working days, while the counselling notifications for the same cycle give a wider window on the same line, so ring early rather than assuming either. Most of the constituent colleges are outside Hyderabad entirely, so a query about a specific campus is better put to that college's associate dean, whose direct mobile numbers the University prints in each admission notification.

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