School Of Planning & Architecture, Bhopal

School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal still had 55 master's seats vacant in September 2026, after JAAP-PG, a Special Drive and one walk-in round, and notified a second walk-in round to fill them. Its undergraduate seats go through JoSAA instead, and a B.Arch or B.Plan student's first semester is billed at Rs 68,450, of which Rs 15,000 is refundable deposits.

SPA Bhopal is a Centrally Funded Technical Institution set up by the Ministry of Education in 2008, on Neelbad Road at Bhauri in Bhopal (SPA Bhopal, contact us). It teaches architecture, planning, design and building engineering and management, and its 2026 postgraduate brochure puts the campus at more than 70 acres (PG information brochure 2026).

Its statutory footing is the School of Planning and Architecture Act, 2014 (No. 37 of 2014), which received Presidential assent on 18 December 2014. The Act declares each school in its Schedule an Institution of national importance, and that Schedule names the Madhya Pradesh society-run school at Bhopal as one of them; section 23 lets the Central Government pay grants to each school after appropriation by Parliament (Gazette of India, SPA Act 2014).

The school has had two full-term directors, Prof. Ajay Khare from July 2009 to July 2014 and Prof. N. Sridharan from July 2017 to July 2022. Around them, the post was held on additional charge by an IISER director, by the Director of SPA Delhi and by the Director of NITTTR Bhopal, until that last additional charge ended on 27 April 2023 and Prof. Kailasa Rao M., a conservation specialist and former Professor of Architecture at SPA Vijayawada, became Director (Director).

Two names are easy to confuse with this one. Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology is a different Bhopal campus, ranked 17th in the same NIRF 2025 architecture table (NIRF 2025 Architecture and Planning), and the SPA schools at New Delhi and Vijayawada are separate corporate bodies under the same Act, each with its own seat matrix and rank record.

SPA Bhopal lists these programmes, each with the department that runs it (programmes offered).

The planning degree is no longer a plain four-year course. From the 2025-26 session, a B.Plan student chooses in the 5th semester whether to leave with the B.Plan after four years or stay a fifth year for an integrated B.Plan and M.Plan dual degree in urban and regional, environmental, or transport planning and logistics, with the specialisation decided by academic record and a departmental aptitude test (JoSAA institute profile).

What a Semester Costs

SPA Bhopal bills by semester, and its JoSAA profile gives the first-semester bill for an undergraduate as Rs 38,800 of institute fees, Rs 9,150 of hostel charges, Rs 5,500 of one-time fees and Rs 15,000 of refundable deposits, a total of Rs 68,450, and states that SC and ST students are exempt from the tuition component (JoSAA institute profile).

Tuition inside that institute fee is Rs 25,000 a semester, the hostel charge is Rs 9,150 a semester, and the postgraduate schedule charges Rs 40,300 of institute fees in an odd semester, with an institute development fee added and a smaller library charge (UG fee structure, 2019-20 onwards, PG fee structure, 2019-20 onwards, PG first-semester fee sheet). The UG schedule marks the hostel fee as compulsory for all students (UG fee structure, 2019-20 onwards). Mess is billed apart from it, on notices the school posts for each session, January to May 2026 and then July to December 2026 (SPA Bhopal).

Candidates admitted through DASA pay tuition of USD 4000 each semester, or USD 2000 under the SAARC category, plus every other institute fee in rupees (JoSAA institute profile, UG fee structure, 2019-20 onwards).

B.Arch and B.Plan Through JoSAA and CSAB

SPA Bhopal's 94 B.Arch seats are allotted on JEE (Main) 2026 Paper IIA and its 38 B.Plan seats on Paper IIB: JoSAA's 2026 business rules list the Bhopal school among the NIT+ institutes admitting on those two papers, and NATA is not among the qualifying examinations they name (JoSAA Business Rules 2026, JoSAA institute profile). The Class XII test differs between Bhopal's two degrees under those rules: B.Arch counts Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics plus two other subjects, B.Plan counts Mathematics plus four others, and either way the candidate needs a 75% aggregate (65% for SC, ST and PwD) or a top 20 percentile place in their board.

CSAB also fills seats here after JoSAA. The school's 2026 reporting call named candidates allotted through JoSAA, CSAB and DASA, and set physical reporting at Bhauri from 13th August to 18th August 2026 (admission, SPA Bhopal).

Four supernumerary seats are filled by SPA Bhopal itself rather than through JoSAA: on each of B.Arch and B.Plan, one for wards of defence or paramilitary personnel killed or permanently disabled in action and one for Kashmiri migrants. For 2026-27 the school took applications by e-mail with a Rs 1000 non-refundable fee until 27th August 2026, admitting strictly by JEE all-India rank (supernumerary seat notification).

Master's Programmes: JAAP-PG, Then the School's Own Rounds

Master's seats are first offered through JAAP-PG 2026; candidates confirmed there reported online until 24.07.2026 and in person from 30th July 2026 to 01st August 2026 (PG admissions 2026). SPA Bhopal's notices set the floor at 55% or a 6.0 CGPA (50% or 5.5 CGPA for SC, ST and PwD), then rank eligible applicants on four inputs: their qualifying-examination marks, any valid GATE, CEED or UGC-NET score, a physical interaction, and work experience (Walk-in Interview Round-II notification).

After JAAP-PG, SPA Bhopal notified three rounds of its own. On 11th July 2026 it opened a Special Drive at institute level for the vacant seats of all eight master's programmes, with interaction on 28th July 2026 (Special Drive notification). A walk-in interview followed on 11th August 2026, and a second walk-in round was notified on 09th September 2026 for interviews on 16th September 2026 (PG admissions 2026, Walk-in Interview Round-II notification). The walk-in fee is Rs 1,500, or Rs 750 for SC, ST and PwD candidates, and anyone who applied to JAAP PG 2026 pays nothing (Walk-in Interview Round-II notification).

PhD

Doctoral applicants need a master's in architecture or planning, or a master's in a related built-environment discipline on a basic degree in architecture or planning, and are selected through an entrance test followed by an interview; a school fellowship needs a valid GATE score or an outside fellowship, and full-time candidates need two years of professional experience for it (doctoral programme).

Closing ranks for SPA Bhopal's B.Arch and B.Plan seats are published, but by the counselling bodies rather than on the school's admission page. JoSAA posts them round by round for 2026 and keeps earlier years back to 2016 in an archive; the tables are generated by picking the institute type (Other GFTIs), then School of Planning & Architecture, Bhopal, the programme and the seat type (JoSAA 2026 opening and closing ranks, JoSAA archive for earlier years, JoSAA institute profile). Seats still empty after JoSAA go to the CSAB special rounds, whose own 2026 opening and closing ranks are linked from the CSAB site (CSAB).

Because JoSAA states that OPEN closes are common rank list positions while EWS, OBC-NCL, SC and ST closes are ranks within the category, the close on SPA Bhopal's 7 ST B.Arch seats sits on a different list from the close on its 37 OPEN ones and says nothing about which seat was harder to get (JoSAA 2026 opening and closing ranks, JoSAA institute profile). With no female-only seats in either Bhopal degree, every row for the school is a gender-neutral close.

SPA Bhopal posts no closing rank for its master's seats. For the Special Drive held on 28 July 2026 it posted programme-wise lists of provisionally eligible and waitlisted candidates, and for the 11 August walk-in round, department-wise results (PG admissions 2026).

SPA Bhopal's 2024-25 outcomes appear twice, once as NIRF counts of graduates and once as the placement cell's offer log. The NIRF 2026 data submission groups graduates in minimum time, placements and median salary by programme length (NIRF 2026 data submission).

Across three architecture batches the median went up once and came back down, peaking at Rs 6,60,000 in 2023-24 between Rs 6,00,000 the year before and Rs 6,05,400 the year after. The PG median rose each year, from Rs 6,00,000 to Rs 7,20,000 to Rs 7,70,500, while the number of PG graduates placed fell from 154 to 122 to 90 as intake shrank (NIRF 2026 data submission).

The Training, Placement and Alumni Cell's own 2024-25 record is programme by programme and reports offers and averages in lakh per annum rather than medians (Annual Report 2024-25).

The B.Plan lines do not reconcile: the cell logs 2 job offers where NIRF counts 10 placed graduates, and NIRF also records 21 of the 31 B.Plan graduates going on to higher studies. The highest single package, 12.6 LPA, went to M.Design students hired by EY; other named recruiters include INI Design Studio, NMP Design Studio, StoneX, Godrej Properties, SYSTRA and HCP (Annual Report 2024-25).

SPA Bhopal's 2026 undergraduate matrix holds 94 B.Arch and 38 B.Plan seats with no female supernumerary seats; both degrees show zero in JoSAA's female-only pool (JoSAA institute profile).

The 2026 PG brochure lists 213 master's seats: 25 in each of seven programmes and 38 in Urban and Regional Planning, with 9 Kashmiri migrant seats over and above and further FN, NRI and PIO seats at 10, 3 and 2 percent (PG information brochure 2026). The brochure's table gives PwD its own column, though its note says the 5% PwD reservation is horizontal and adjusted within the category columns. The NIRF filing puts sanctioned PG intake at 188 for 2024-25, and neither document explains the gap to 213 (NIRF 2026 data submission).

By 09th September 2026, after JAAP-PG, the Special Drive and one walk-in round, 55 seats were still vacant across seven programmes (Walk-in Interview Round-II notification):

Urban and Regional Planning is the only master's programme missing from that list. The shortfall has a history: the NIRF 2026 filing shows 160 PG students admitted against a sanctioned 188 in 2021-22, then 133 and 108 in the next two years (NIRF 2026 data submission).

NIRF 2025 ranks SPA Bhopal 11th in Architecture and Planning with a score of 60.69; among the 40 ranked institutions it is third on outreach and inclusivity and sixth from the bottom on research (NIRF 2025 Architecture and Planning).

On outreach and inclusivity only Jamia Millia Islamia at 86.17 and Amity University at 83.69 score higher among all ranked institutions, and SPA Bhopal's 68.75 on teaching and resources beats SPA New Delhi's 65.89. Research and professional practice is the drag, with Bhopal's 22.83 below SPA Vijayawada's 30.35 (NIRF 2025 Architecture and Planning). The school's NIRF 2026 filing records consultancy receipts rising from Rs 1,56,48,764 in 2022-23 to Rs 20,64,47,984 in 2024-25, against Rs 2,93,62,314 received for 16 sponsored research projects that year (NIRF 2026 data submission).

NIRF has not yet published a 2026 architecture ranking, so the 2025 table is still the latest; the school's 2026 data submission is already posted on its NIRF page (NIRF, SPA Bhopal).

The 2024-25 Annual Report described campus development as in its final stages, with landscaping under way, a 400 capacity auditorium opened on 26th January 2025, and a library holding 12,354 volumes and 2,211 theses and dissertations, with subscriptions including Bloomsbury Architecture Library, EBSCO Art and Architecture Complete and Indiastat (Annual Report 2024-25).

Studio work is backed by these facilities:

• An architectural workshop of 280 sq.mt. with a laser engraver, plotter, hotwire cutter and a material library, which students may use only after an induction session (workshop).
• A GIS laboratory with 27 high-end workstations, 51 ArcGIS licences, Trimble GPS and DGPS units, used on live work such as the GIS based master plan for Uttarakhand 2041 (GIS laboratory).
• Two graphics laboratories of 37 workstations each, a transport lab licensed for PTV Visum and Vissim, an environmental monitoring lab, and a 75 sqm Plant Lab greenhouse set up in 2023 (Annual Report 2024-25).

Hostel

Living on campus is not optional. The PG brochure calls the school a residential campus where all students are required to stay in the hostel (PG information brochure 2026), and rooms at Bhauri are twin-sharing with study tables, cupboards and balconies; students bring their own mattresses (hostel). A room is allotted only after course registration, payment of the hostel fee, and an admission form signed by the student and parents with local-guardian details and ID (hostel admission procedure 2026-27). The mess fee notice names three halls: Boys Hostel One, Girls Hostel One, and a shared Boys Hostel Two and Girls Hostel Two block (mess fee notice, July to December 2026).

Most of the regular faculty in the NIRF 2026 submission joined between 2009 and 2013, assistant professors far outnumber full professors across the list, and a separate group of adhoc or contractual assistant professors has been added since 2021 (NIRF 2026 data submission).

The five deans are Prof. Rama U. Pandey (Academics), Prof. Ajay Vinodia (Planning and Development), Prof. Vishakha Kawathekar (Student Affairs), Prof. Rachna Khare (Faculty Welfare) and Prof. Nikhil Ranjan Mandal (Research and Consultancy) (deans). Rachna Khare is principal investigator on SABHI, the Design Innovation Centre project on access to built heritage for people with disabilities (SABHI project note), and Prof. Ajay Khare, the school's Director from July 2009 to July 2014, now heads the Department of Conservation (Director, PG information brochure 2026).

At a glance

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