School Of Planning & Architecture, New Delhi

SPA New Delhi is the only institution in the whole NIRF 2025 Architecture and Planning list to be marked 100.00 on perception, and the same row scores it 37.73 on research and professional practice, the weakest figure in that column anywhere in the top ten (NIRF 2025 Architecture ranking). Standing among architects and standing among researchers point in opposite directions here, and a candidate should know which of the two a degree from this school is mostly buying.

The school teaches architecture, planning and design, and nothing else. That single fact separates it from every engineering campus that runs a B.Arch on the side, and it is why all twelve departments of studies here sit inside those three fields rather than spreading across faculties. It is an Institution of National Importance under an Act of Parliament, funded through the Ministry of Education (School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi).

Two institutions were folded into the one that exists today, and the sequence explains why its founding date is quoted so inconsistently. A Department of Architecture opened in 1941 inside the Delhi Polytechnic at Kashmiri Gate, and its first students collected national diplomas in architecture in 1950. The Government of India then set up the School of Town and Country Planning in 1955, which ran for seven years out of rented rooms in Kapurthala House on Man Singh Road while its own building was raised. Humayun Kabir laid the foundation stone of what is now the Planning Campus on 26 May 1958, the two halves were merged under the present name in 1959, and the architecture department finished moving off the Kashmere Gate site by 1965 (SPA Legacy).

Deemed University status followed in 1979 (SPA Legacy), and the SPA Act of 2014 later placed the school, along with its Bhopal and Vijayawada counterparts, on a statutory footing as Institutions of National Importance (JAAP-PG 2026 notice). Bhopal and Vijayawada are separate institutions with their own directors and their own campuses; sharing the name and one postgraduate admission process does not make them branches of the Delhi school.

Enrolment across every programme stood at 1,400 in 2024-25, of which 657 were reading for the Bachelor of Architecture, 136 for the Bachelor of Planning and 128 were doctoral scholars (Annual Report 2024-25). The estate it teaches on is 30 acres (SPA New Delhi), split across two blocks at Indraprastha Estate and a residential campus further south.

The 2024-25 course list runs to two bachelor's degrees, ten master's degrees, one integrated bachelor-to-master route in planning and a doctoral programme, and every one of them sits inside architecture, planning or design. The Bachelor of Architecture runs five years and the Bachelor of Planning four, which is the reverse of the usual assumption that the planning degree is the longer one.

Both bachelor's intakes carry supernumerary seats on top of the figures above: a further 15 percent for foreign nationals, non-resident Indians and persons of Indian origin, split 10 percent, 3 percent and 2 percent, plus one reserved seat per degree (Annual Report 2024-25, under graduate programmes).

The fee is published as a notice per session and per stage rather than as one standing schedule, so the honest way to read it is head by head. For the 2024-25 session, an undergraduate past the first year paid Rs 49,000 in the general and OBC categories and Rs 29,000 in the SC and ST categories, made up of Rs 1,000 registration, tuition of Rs 40,000 or Rs 20,000, an academic support fee of Rs 5,000 covering library, audio-visual, computer lab and internet, Rs 2,600 of student activity charges and Rs 400 to the students aid fund (undergraduate fees notice).

Two conditions attached to those notices cost real money and are easy to miss. Miss the deposit date and the fee is still accepted, with a fine of Rs 50 for every day of delay, for about ten days; after that the student's name is struck off the rolls and re-admission costs a further Rs 4,000 on top of the fee and the accumulated fine, and only with the prior approval of the competent authority (undergraduate fees notice). A student joining in the first year is billed on a different notice again, issued each July as a first-semester fee notice for that year's JoSAA and CSAB admits and settled against whatever was already paid during counselling, so the continuing-year total above is not the figure a fresher pays on arrival (UG admission page).

Undergraduate entry runs on the Joint Entrance Examination conducted by the National Testing Agency, and the school's own admissions page names that examination and nothing else, pointing applicants to the NTA website for the rest (admissions). No architecture aptitude test of the school's own sits in front of it, and NATA is not the route. That examination splits at this level: the NTA sets Paper 2A for B.Arch and Paper 2B for B.Planning and declares the two sets of scores on separate notices (JEE (Main) score notices, NTA), so the school's two undergraduate degrees are entered off two different rank lists rather than one. The seat is then allotted on the counselling side rather than by the school, and the school is listed on the Joint Seat Allocation Authority's own roll of participating institutes, at 4 Block-B, I P Estate (JoSAA participating institutes). Its UG admission page for 2026-27 carries an application form for candidates admitted through JoSAA, a first-semester fee notice headed for admission through JoSAA and CSAB, and the provisional list of seats allotted in UG courses as per CSAB and DASA status (UG admission page). The document checklist bears that out: it asks for the admit card issued by JoSAA or DASA, the rank card for that year's JEE, and the letter of offer for admission issued by CSAB, in original (checklist for document verification, UG 2026-27). Foreign nationals, non-resident Indians and persons of Indian origin apply separately through DASA and are counted over and above the sanctioned intake, at 10 percent, 3 percent and 2 percent respectively (under graduate programmes).

One warning on that page deserves more weight than any of the arithmetic around it. The school states plainly that a student admitted to the B.Arch without having cleared a Council of Architecture approved aptitude test in architecture will not be eligible for registration with the Council (under graduate programmes). Registration is what lets a graduate practise under the title of architect, so the condition is about the career and not about the admission.

Postgraduate entry does not touch JoSAA at all. The master's programmes are filled through Joint Admission for Architecture and Planning, Postgraduate, a single application shared by the Delhi, Bhopal and Vijayawada schools and hosted for 2026 by the Registrar at Delhi. A candidate needs at least 55 percent marks or a 6.0 CGPA in the qualifying degree, relaxed to 50 percent or 5.5 for SC, ST and PwD applicants, and selection weighs the qualifying examination, a valid GATE, CEED or UGC-NET score where applicable, a physical interaction and work experience. The application fee is Rs 3,500, or Rs 1,750 for SC, ST, EWS and PwD candidates, and a candidate may list any number of eligible course choices across all three schools (JAAP-PG 2026).

That physical interaction is not a formality bolted onto a score. For the 2026 cycle it ran at Delhi from 16 April to 21 April, may take in an interview, a portfolio assessment and a statement of purpose, and only then was the rank list published, on 28 April, with counselling rounds running to 23 May and a special round open until 10 July (JAAP-PG 2026). A portfolio therefore does work here that a rank cannot do, which is the opposite of how a JEE-driven undergraduate seat is decided.

Doctoral entry is a third machine again, and it runs off no common test. Applications are open all year and scholars are admitted twice, at the start of the January and the July semester, on an application fee of INR 2,500 for Indian nationals. The floor is a master's degree in a course the school teaches with at least 60 per cent aggregate, or a bachelor's in architecture, planning or civil engineering with 80 per cent and three years of relevant experience, or the same bachelor's with 60 per cent and ten years of it; a master's in an allied discipline needs 60 per cent and ten years of experience and is judged case by case by the departmental research committee, SC and ST applicants get a five per cent relaxation, and part-time scholars in employment must add their employer's no-objection certificate (PhD programmes).

Newly admitted undergraduates for 2026-27 were called for physical verification of documents in three batches by serial number between 16 and 18 August 2026, with the application form, self-attested copies and every original in hand (schedule for physical document verification). Orientation followed on 19 August 2026 at the Jhabvala Auditorium in the Architecture Block (UG orientation circular).

The school publishes no closing rank of its own for either undergraduate degree. What it does post, each August, is the provisional list of seats allotted in UG courses as per CSAB and DASA status (UG admission page), which settles who is in but not the rank that got them there; the rank record itself is kept by the counselling body and has to be read for the exact degree, quota and category being entered, because it moves with every round.

What the school's own filings do show is which of the two degrees actually competes for its seats. The five-year degree has run close to its sanctioned strength for years: 138 admitted against 141 sanctioned in 2020-21, 132 against 137 the year before, 116 against 122 the year before that. The four-year degree reads nothing like that, at 42 admitted against 52 sanctioned in 2021-22, 45 against 50 in 2020-21 and 29 against 45 in 2019-20 (NIRF 2026 data submission).

For a candidate that gap is the whole point: architecture fills to the edge of its sanction every year and planning does not, so the rank that clears the second is not the rank that clears the first, and the two should never be read off one cutoff.

The school files its placement counts with NIRF by programme length, and the three lines disagree with each other sharply enough that a single institute-wide percentage would hide the whole story.

The master's programmes are where this school places people. Of 223 postgraduates finishing in minimum time in 2024-25, 215 were placed at a median of Rs 8,00,000, and that median rose from Rs 6,75,000 for the 2022-23 batch to Rs 8,00,000 for 2023-24 and has held there (NIRF 2026 data submission). The five-year architecture degree tracks below it, at a median of Rs 7,50,000 for two batches running.

The four-year planning degree behaves like a feeder rather than a terminal qualification. Three of its 22 graduates were placed and 19 went on to further study, which is not a placement failure so much as a description of what the cohort does next, and it is consistent with the school's own integrated route that lets a Bachelor of Planning student continue into the Master of Planning (NIRF 2026 data submission).

Recruiting is run from October each year by a placement cell of student coordinators and faculty mentors drawn from every department, and the employers it names sit in real estate, design, construction and infrastructure, consultancy and research: DLF, JLL, Knight Frank, CBRE, Cushman and Wakefield, Colliers, Savills, AECOM, WSP, Ramboll, Atkins, Systra, Dar Al-Handasah, L&T Construction, NCRTC, DIMTS, Ernst and Young, the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, and studios including Studio Lotus, INI Studio and Studio Symbiosis (our recruiters).

The school publishes its seats category by category, for both undergraduate degrees and for all ten master's courses, so a candidate can see the size of the queue they are actually standing in rather than the size of the programme.

The postgraduate block is larger than both bachelor's degrees put together: 276 seats across the ten master's courses, of which 111 are open general, 76 OBC, 41 SC, 19 ST and 29 EWS, running from 39 seats each in Urban Planning and Building Engineering and Management down to 19 each in Regional Planning, Environmental Planning and Architectural Conservation (reservation of seats). The ten two-year courses between them therefore hold more places than the five-year and four-year degrees put together, which is unusual for a campus whose public reputation rests on its architecture degree.

Four undergraduate seats sit outside those totals, one per degree for wards and dependants of defence or paramilitary personnel killed or permanently disabled in action and one per degree for Kashmiri migrants, and they are applied for directly to the school rather than through counselling; four more are added over and above the postgraduate total for Kashmiri migrants, Kashmiri Pandits and Kashmiri Hindu families (reservation of seats, JAAP-PG 2026). Persons with benchmark disabilities hold 5 percent horizontally, adjusted inside the category columns rather than added to them.

The two intake counts the school files look contradictory and are not. Its NIRF return gives the 2024-25 sanctioned intake as 154 on the five-year programme and 52 on the four-year one (NIRF 2026 data submission), against the 133 and 44 above; the difference is exactly the 15 percent supernumerary block for foreign nationals, non-resident Indians and persons of Indian origin plus the single Kashmiri migrant seat on each degree, added back in.

NIRF 2025 places the school 8th in Architecture and Planning with an overall score of 65.11, and the row underneath that number is the most lopsided in the top ten.

The 100.00 on perception is the only full mark in that column on any of the forty ranked institutions, and it is not close: the next figure down the column is Anna University's 82.93 (NIRF 2025 Architecture and Planning ranking). Research and professional practice at 37.73 is the lowest of the ten institutions at the top of the table. The profession rates this school above every other architecture and planning address in the country and the research metric does not, and the single rank of 8 is the compromise struck between those two readings.

The places immediately above are close enough to be noise: CEPT University is 6th at 65.73 and NIT Rourkela 7th at 65.72, a hundredth of a point apart, with this school a short way behind both (NIRF 2025 Architecture and Planning ranking). Those two scores belong to those two institutions and describe neither the teaching nor the intake here.

Architecture and Planning is also the only NIRF 2025 table this address appears in. The school filed an Overall submission for 2025 as well (NIRF filings, SPA New Delhi), but it is in neither the published Overall list nor its 101-150 and 151-200 rank bands, and it is not in the University table (NIRF 2025 Overall ranking, NIRF 2025 University ranking). Any other NIRF figure carrying the SPA name belongs to Bhopal, ranked 11th at 60.69, or to Vijayawada, ranked 19th at 58.49 (NIRF 2025 Architecture and Planning ranking).

Twelve departments of studies carry the teaching, and they map onto the master's list almost one to one: Architecture, Physical Planning, Architectural Conservation, Building Engineering and Management, Environmental Planning, Housing, Industrial Design, Landscape Architecture, Regional Planning, Transport Planning, Urban Design and Urban Planning (SPA New Delhi).

Urban Planning is the oldest of them and the first postgraduate department the school ever had, started in 1955 as the Department of Urban and Regional Planning (Department of Urban Planning). Alongside the departments the school lists fifteen research centres and units: a Centre for Analysis and Systems Studies, a Centre for Real Estate Studies, a Design Innovation Centre, an Environment Information System centre, centres for urban disaster studies, water, climate change and human settlements, fire, road safety, shared and electric mobility, urban biodiversity, urban design innovation and urban freight, and separate GIS and remote sensing units (SPA New Delhi).

Consultancy is a working part of the place rather than a line in a brochure. Paid advisory work outnumbers funded research here roughly four to one by project count: 73 consultancy commissions came in during 2024-25, placed by 55 separate client organisations and worth Rs 4,81,71,439, against 19 sponsored research projects, one per funding agency, worth Rs 4,39,67,921 (NIRF 2026 data submission). The consultancy count has risen from 37 projects in 2022-23 to 44 and then 73, though the money peaked a year earlier, at Rs 8,12,00,000 in 2023-24, so the practice is taking on more work at a smaller average size.

Libraries operate on both the Planning and the Architecture campuses, on a shared collection of more than 83,091 books and documents, with JSTOR giving access to over 2065 archived e-journals, off-campus remote access and a web catalogue (library). The count of subscribed journals is published twice on that page and the two figures disagree, 81 in one place and 98 in the other, with nothing on the page to reconcile them. Membership of DELNET adds the union catalogue of 6839 member libraries. Borrowing is tiered by category, with teaching faculty allowed 12 books for 30 days against a shorter 15 day loan for everyone else (library).

Computing is centralised in the Centre for Analysis and Systems Studies, whose head also runs the GIS Lab, set up in July 1999 and equipped with ArcGIS, ERDAS Imagine with the Leica Photogrammetry Suite, and the Autodesk suite including Revit and 3ds Max (labs).

Two laboratories anchor the practical teaching. The Materials Testing and Surveying Laboratory carries a universal testing machine of 400 kN capacity and a compression testing machine of 2000 kN, both computer-interfaced, alongside ultrasonic pulse velocity and rebound hammer equipment and electronic total stations for survey work. The Conservation Materials Laboratory does physical examination under magnification and chemical analysis of historic material, with visiting scientists associated with the Archaeological Survey of India running courses in it for conservation students (labs). A material workshop trains students in carpentry and metalwork and is used for architectural model making, and it is looked after by the Head of the Department of Industrial Design (workshop).

Sport runs through a cell that holds an annual meet named ATHLOS and sends teams to inter-SPA meets, with courts and rooms for basketball, badminton, volleyball, table tennis and billiards and a garden gym (sports). Wheelchairs and transport between buildings are answered yes in the NIRF return, while lifts or ramps and specially designed toilets are reported for more than 80 percent of buildings rather than all of them, which is a live distinction on an estate split between the Planning block, the Architecture block and Maharani Bagh (NIRF 2026 data submission).

This is the section a candidate from outside Delhi should read first, because the school itself does not soften it. Accommodation is described on its own page as very limited, offered only to outstation students and subject to availability, with the flat statement that many outstation students may not get a room and will have to arrange their own stay in the city (hostels).

The arithmetic behind that warning is not hidden either. The school counts more than 450 hostel seats (SPA New Delhi) against a roll of 1,400 students in 2024-25 (Annual Report 2024-25). Its NIRF return counts 648 students on the five-year undergraduate programme, of whom 554 come from outside the state and another 35 from outside the country, so the outstation group in that one degree is already larger than the entire hostel (NIRF 2026 data submission).

Outstation is defined, not assumed. The allotment paperwork makes a student declare that neither they nor their parents have a residence within a 30 KM radius of Delhi-NCR, with self-attested proof attached, and warns that a false declaration forfeits both the room and the deposits (hostel allotment form). Rooms sit at two addresses, which the hostel office circulates as the ITO hostel beside the teaching blocks and the Maharani Bagh hostel to the south, and the mess is billed apart from the room: a student joining the mess in 2024-25 paid a mess deposit of Rs 5,000 and a food charges advance of Rs 20,000 on top of establishment charges, and no room is allotted until the forms are in and the hostel fee, mess fee and any old mess dues are paid in full (mess fees notice 2024-25). The room charge itself is issued as a separate hostel fee notice each session, billed by the year and never merged with the academic fee; it covers room rent, electricity and water, and a refundable hostel security that a first-time allottee pays once and a returning student does not pay again (hostel fee notice 2026-27, UG admission page). The school publishes the amounts only as a scanned notice on that page, so read them there.

The 105 full-time figure the school leads with is a sanctioned strength rather than a headcount: its own Annual Report calls it 105 fulltime sanctioned faculty (Annual Report 2024-25), while the NIRF return lists the 263 teaching appointments actually in place and only 68 of them are regular, against 170 visiting and 25 adhoc or contractual (NIRF 2026 data submission). On a studio-taught course a visiting cadre two and a half times the size of the permanent one is what puts working architects, conservation specialists and transport planners in front of a jury, and it also means most of the teaching here is not done by tenured staff.

That permanent core of 68 is unusually settled at one end and unusually new at the other. The same return records regular faculty who joined in 1990, 1992, 1993 and 1996 and are still in post, while 24 of the 68 regular appointments were made between 2020 and 2022, most of them assistant professors (NIRF 2026 data submission). A candidate reading a departmental faculty list is looking at two intakes three decades apart rather than a single continuum.

The Director, Prof. Virendra Kumar Paul, is himself a product of that continuity: he took his B.Arch at Chandigarh College of Architecture, then his master's and his doctorate at this school, and has taught here since 1990 (administration). All five deanships are held the same way, from inside the departments of studies: Poonam Prakash of Physical Planning as Dean (Academics), Rabidyuti Biswas of Physical Planning as Dean (Planning and Development), Arunava Dasgupta of Urban Design as Dean (Students Affairs), P.S.N. Rao of Housing as Dean (Faculty Welfare) and Sewa Ram of Transport Planning as Dean (Research) (deans).

The school publishes no institute-wide roll of distinguished alumni, and rather than fill that gap with names it has not claimed, the honest version is where its graduates actually go. The Department of Urban Planning states that most of its alumni work in central and state town and country planning organisations, development authorities and urban local bodies, with others at the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the Department for International Development, and a growing number in private development, urban design consultancy, research institutes and non-governmental organisations (Department of Urban Planning).

The alumni body itself is small for an institution of this age. SPA Alumni was registered in 1992 under the Societies Registration Act of 1860 and reports around 300 members, and its stated objects include running scholarship funds for students in need and holding representation on the school's decision-making bodies (alumni). A student expecting the kind of dense, monetised alumni network that older engineering and management campuses run should calibrate to that number.

Teaching happens on two campuses at Indraprastha Estate in central Delhi, with the residential campus at New Friends Colony some distance south (Annual Report 2024-25). Each teaching block keeps its own library counter (contact us) and its own commercial outlet, selling stationery and taking in the printing that student submissions need; a third outlet at the Maharani Bagh residential complex opens at night, which the school explains simply by saying its students work round the clock (SPA New Delhi).

At a glance

Quick facts