School Of Planning & Architecture Vijaywada

School of Planning and Architecture, Vijayawada ranked 7th in NIRF's architecture table in 2022 and 19th in 2025. The parameter that moved most in between was teaching, learning and resources, which fell from 75.87 to 57.81 while the school's research score went up. Its B.Arch and B.Plan seats come through JoSAA; its master's seats, once split between CCMT and direct admission, now go through JAAP-PG and then the school's own spot rounds. A master's student in the unreserved category living in hostel is billed Rs 1,50,000 for the first year of 2026-27, before mess.

SPA Vijayawada was set up by the then Ministry of Human Resource Development in 2008 and moved its classes to a permanent campus on ITI Road, in the middle of Vijayawada city, in June 2018 (JoSAA institute profile). The school's 2023-24 Annual Report dates its status as an Institute of National Importance to 2014, when Parliament passed the School of Planning and Architecture Act (Annual Report 2023-24, Acts and Statutes).

Teaching is split between just two departments. Dr. Amitava Sarkar heads Architecture and Dr. Adinarayanane R heads Planning (contact directory).

Three of the six outside projects in the 2023-24 Annual Report were for Andhra Pradesh: a redesign of the APSRTC bus fascia that the corporation rolled out on new buses, housing layouts and building designs for families displaced by the Polavaram irrigation project in Eluru and ASR districts, and the vetting of administrative, educational and health manuals for the Andhra Pradesh State Architectural Board. Two more were Tamil Nadu jobs, a Tiruchirappalli district regional plan for DTCP Chennai and a grid-of-roads survey for CMDA. Andhra Pradesh's Principal Secretary for Higher Education sat on the school's Board of Governors that year (Annual Report 2023-24). Consultancy income in the NIRF filing went from Rs 7,73,631 on eight jobs in 2021-22 to Rs 1,28,75,000 on six in 2023-24 (NIRF 2025 data submission).

SPA Vijayawada teaches two bachelor's degrees, nine master's degrees and doctoral programmes in both departments. The intake figures below are the school's own, with DASA seats for foreign and NRI candidates counted on top (courses offered).

Two of those master's courses, Architectural Conservation and Building Engineering and Management, are labelled self-financing on the course page (courses offered). Master of Design is the newest, and the school's PG brochure credits its first-year students with filing more than 50 IPRs through the Design Innovation Centre in 2025-26 (PG brochure 2026-27). Every programme is taught in English, which a Dean Academic notice of August 2026 says has been the case since the school opened (medium of instruction notice).

The 2026-27 Fee Sheet

SPA Vijayawada bills fees on an annual basis, and its 2026-27 master's schedule splits the first-year bill into four heads (complete fee structure 2026-27).

The hostel line carries an annual seat rent of INR 10,000 that day scholars pay as well, so an unreserved-category master's student living off campus still owes Rs 1,10,000 in the second year. DASA admits pay the seat rent, hostel and deposits in rupees and their tuition separately, at whatever DASA notifies for the year (complete fee structure 2026-27).

The B.Arch and B.Plan sheet and the doctoral sheet in the same document use the same four heads, the undergraduate tuition line is lower than the master's one, and both deposits drop out of the bill from the second year (complete fee structure 2026-27).

Mess is billed on its own notice. For 2024-25 the school charged every student Rs 19,400 a semester (mess fee 2024-25), and the current year's mess charge sits in a separate notice on the fee page (fee structure).

B.Arch and B.Plan

At Vijayawada the undergraduate route is JEE (Main) 2026: the Paper IIA rank counts for architecture and the Paper IIB rank for planning, with JoSAA allotting first and CSAB filling leftovers (JoSAA seat allocation rules, 2026). The school's admissions page names both bodies for 2026 and posts separate reporting instructions for JoSAA and CSAB admits and for DASA admits (SPAV admissions).

SPA Vijayawada also runs part of the machinery. In 2023-24 it served as a JoSAA and CSAB reporting centre, verified and admitted 131 candidates to its own B.Arch and B.Plan seats, and acted as the online verification centre for SPA Bhopal, IIIT Bhopal and Pondicherry Engineering College as well (Annual Report 2023-24).

Wards of Kashmiri migrant or Kashmiri Pandit families, and dependants of defence or paramilitary personnel killed or disabled in action, apply to Vijayawada directly for places kept over and above the JoSAA matrix: the 2026-27 notice holds one B.Arch and one B.Plan place for each group, wants a separate SAMARTH application for each programme, and orders applicants by their JEE Main 2026 All India Rank. By September 2026 the admissions page showed a first provisional list and a second one drawn from the waitlist (supernumerary seat notification, SPAV admissions).

Master's Degrees: From CCMT to JAAP-PG

Until 2024-25, SPA Vijayawada filled half the seats in each master's programme through its own direct admissions and the other half through CCMT, the counselling used by the NITs; Master of Design, new that year, was filled entirely by direct admission (admissions 2024-25). In 2023 those direct admissions included a written test on 15 May, followed by five rounds of results and three spot rounds (admissions 2023-24).

For 2026 the first route was JAAP-PG, with registration from 02 Mar to 29 Mar 2026, a special round from 26 May 2026 and physical reporting at Vijayawada on 15 and 16 July 2026 (courses offered). The school then ran its own spot round, opened on 17 July 2026 on the SAMARTH portal. That notice charged Rs. 2000 per programme applied for, put applicants through document verification first, and then ranked those who cleared it on 100 marks: 60 for the interview, 30 for the portfolio and 10 for the statement of purpose (PG spot round notification 2026). The course page and the 2026-27 Master of Design brochure still ask for a 6.5 CGPA or 60%, but the spot round notice took applicants from 6.0 or 55%, and from 5.5 or 50% for SC, ST and PwD (courses offered, PG brochure 2026-27, PG spot round notification 2026).

Seats still empty after that went to a final spot round, walk-in or online, and the Department of Architecture held its interviews on 02-09-2026, in person in the forenoon and online in the afternoon (SPAV admissions, interview circular).

Some programmes take graduates from well outside architecture. The spot round notice opens Landscape Architecture to master's graduates in botany, zoology, horticulture, agriculture, forestry, ecology, geology or geomorphology, Architectural Conservation to master's graduates in history, anthropology, museology or archaeology and to integrated law graduates specialising in heritage law, and Environmental Planning and Management to integrated law graduates in environmental or general law. Master of Design needs a valid CEED score from anyone without an architecture degree. Employees of government departments, PSUs, research labs or reputed practices can apply as sponsored candidates after two years with the employer (PG spot round notification 2026).

PhD

Doctoral admission is rolling rather than annual. SPA Vijayawada issues a notification for each semester session, takes applications on SAMARTH, publishes department-wise entrance syllabi, and had already announced dates for a January 2027 session by September 2026 (SPAV admissions). The programme has run since 2012-13 and admits under five categories: regular full-time with or without an MoE scholarship, sponsored, off-campus, in-house staff, and foreign; 13 of the 22 scholars enrolled in 2023-24 had joined that year (Annual Report 2023-24).

JoSAA publishes opening and closing ranks for both of Vijayawada's undergraduate programmes; it is spav.ac.in that carries no rank table. The 2026 figures come out of a form rather than a fixed page: choose a round (rounds 1 to 5 are listed), Government Funded Technical Institutions, School of Planning & Architecture: Vijayawada and the programme, and JoSAA returns separate OPEN, OPEN (PwD), EWS, OBC-NCL, SC and ST rows, every one gender-neutral (JoSAA 2026 opening and closing ranks). A second form covers 2016 to 2025 (JoSAA archive of opening and closing ranks).

Master's seats filled in the school's own spot rounds carry no closing rank, because Stage II marks out of 100 decide them; the admissions page posts eligibility lists and then provisionally selected and wait-listed candidates instead (PG spot round notification 2026, SPAV admissions).

The newest placement numbers in public view are in SPA Vijayawada's NIRF 2025 submission, covering students who graduated in 2023-24; its NIRF page lists no later filing (NIRF 2025 data submission, NIRF, SPA Vijayawada).

Median pay rose for every programme between the 2021-22 and 2023-24 batches: Rs 4,52,000 to Rs 5,20,000 on B.Plan, Rs 4,65,000 to Rs 5,65,000 on B.Arch and Rs 5,58,000 to Rs 6,15,000 for master's graduates (NIRF 2025 data submission). Half of the 28 B.Plan graduates of 2023-24 took jobs and the other half went on to study.

The Training and Placement page gives neither a highest package nor company-wise offer counts. Run by Dr. Uma Sankar Basina as faculty placement in-charge, it posts recruiter brochures programme by programme for the 2026 batch instead (training and placement). Among the employers the school names are Andhra Pradesh bodies such as the Capital Region Development Authority, Amaravati Development Corporation, the AP Space Applications Centre and Kakinada Smart City Corporation, alongside AECOM, Atkins, Deloitte, JLL, PwC, CIDCO, IL&FS, World Resources Institute and Architect Hafeez Contractor (JoSAA institute profile).

On B.Arch, 37 of JoSAA's 94 seats at Vijayawada for 2026 are OPEN, and one is kept for an EWS candidate with a disability, a seat the 38-seat B.Plan matrix does not have (JoSAA institute profile).

Intake was cut in 2023-24. In the NIRF 2025 filing the five-year programme's sanctioned seats drop from 110 (2022-23) to 94 (2023-24), the four-year one's from 46 to 38, and the master's from 232 to 200 (NIRF 2025 data submission).

The same filing shows how far first-year admissions fell short of intake in earlier batches.

For the 2026 spot round the school published a tentative vacancy seat matrix programme by programme, listing a sponsored-category vacancy in each master's course alongside the reserved and open ones (SPAV admissions, tentative vacancy seat matrix).

Vijayawada's latest NIRF position is 19th among architecture and planning institutions, on 58.49 points in the 2025 table (NIRF 2025 Architecture ranking). Before that it was 9th in 2019 and 2020 and 8th in 2021 (NIRF 2019, NIRF 2020, NIRF 2021), and the four most recent tables show how the rank came down.

The drop from 7th to 18th came in a single year, and the teaching, learning and resources score fell with it, from 75.87 to 58.44; graduation outcomes barely moved and research edged up (NIRF 2022, NIRF 2023). By 2025 the teaching score of 57.81 was lower than all but three of the top 20, NIT Tiruchirappalli, VNIT Nagpur and MNIT Jaipur, while research and professional practice had climbed every year to 30.35 (NIRF 2025 Architecture ranking).

Perception is where Vijayawada does well. Only five institutions in the 2025 table score higher than its 62.52: SPA New Delhi, Anna University, IIT Kharagpur, NIT Tiruchirappalli and IIT Roorkee (NIRF 2025 Architecture ranking).

The ITI Road campus covers around 9.66 acres, with an academic and administrative block of about 30,000 sqm and a further 2.66 acres of green land set aside for outdoor sports (Annual Report 2023-24). Its student housing won the Eurasian Prize 2018 for low and mid-rise housing, and the campus design received a GRIHA Exemplary Performance Award in 2018 for passive architecture (campus highlights). Rooftop solar generates 108000 KWH a year and a 100 KLD sewage treatment plant supplies recycled water meant for gardening and flushing (Annual Report 2023-24).

The 2023-24 Annual Report describes twelve laboratories. Four of them, as the report describes them (Annual Report 2023-24):

• A Conservation Lab with a Faro Focus 3D S 350 Plus long-range laser scanner and Agisoft photogrammetry software for recording monuments (Annual Report 2023-24).
• A Transportation Lab licensed for PTV Visum, PTV Vissim and CUBE, used by all planning students.
• An architecture computer lab of 72 workstations, each licensed for Revit, 3ds Max, Rhinoceros and Adobe Creative Cloud (Annual Report 2023-24).
• A Building Construction Yard where students build brick arches, jaali screens and RCC columns with local masons.

The central library held more than 9000 print books on 12-09-2024, along with 65 print journal titles, over 1600 theses and around 126 toposheets, and is open until 07:00 pm on working days (central library).

Hostel

SPA Vijayawada's hostels hold 777 students, and most of them live alone. The 2023-24 Annual Report counts 519 single rooms and 129 double rooms across the boys' and girls' blocks (Annual Report 2023-24, SPAV hostels).

A room is not guaranteed past the first year. Under the 2025-26 rules students re-apply every year and are re-allotted on academic merit, non-locals get preference, and a student who withdraws before the programme starts gets the hostel fee back less Rs. 5000 (hostel rules 2025-26). Each room comes with a cot, table, chair and almirah but no mattress, and hostel in-time is 9:30 PM (hostel rules 2025-26, SPAV hostels).

Prof. Dr. Ramesh Srikonda has been Director since September 2022. He came to SPA Vijayawada in 2010 after a career in the Central Public Works Department that he entered through UPSC in 1985, rising to Chief Architect, and he helped build the M.Arch in Sustainable Architecture (Director).

The deans are Dr. Venkata Krishna Kumar Sadhu (Academic), Dr. Ch Anil Kumar (Planning and Development), Dr. Uma Sankar Basina (Students Affairs), Dr. Rajakumari Muthusamy (Faculty Welfare) and Dr. M. Banu Chitra (Research) (deanships). Sadhu took over the academic deanship from Prof. Dr. Lilly Rose A in May 2026 (office order, Dean Academic).

Two hiring rounds account for more than half the teachers in the NIRF 2025 filing: appointments in 2009 and 2010, while the school was being set up, among them Srikonda, Dr. G Karteek, Dr. Nagaraju Kaja and Dr. Kranti Kumar Myneni, and a bigger batch between October 2018 and January 2019, just after the move to ITI Road. Appointments since 2020 include adhoc and contractual assistant professors (NIRF 2025 data submission), and in 2026 the school advertised for contract faculty in both departments (SPA Vijayawada).

Some faculty research starts from the region. Lilly Rose Amirtham's 2024 paper in the Indian Journal of Traditional Knowledge studied how toy making shapes house forms in Kondapalli village in Andhra Pradesh, and Karthik Chadalavada assessed thermal comfort in a traditional house in Amaravathi (Annual Report 2023-24).

At a glance

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