U.p. Rajarshi Tandon Open University, Allahabad

Uttar Pradesh Rajarshi Tandon Open University prints more programmes in its 2026-27 brochure than the University Grants Commission has put its name to. Most of its degrees sit on a UGC recognition order that runs to January 2028, but the B.Ed., the BCA and a handful of master's degrees are on a different footing, and the difference matters before the fee is paid.

UPRTOU is Uttar Pradesh's state open university, headquartered at Shantipuram, Phaphamau, in Prayagraj. Official records still add the city's former name, Allahabad, in brackets, as the UGC's March 2025 letter on the university's 12-B status does. The university's brochure dates its founding to 1998 and its present legal basis to the Uttar Pradesh Rajarshi Tandon Open University Act, 1999 (Act No. 10 of 1999), with the first academic session starting in July 1999. Its Chancellor is the Governor of Uttar Pradesh, Smt. Anandiben Patel.

The Act gives the university jurisdiction over the whole of Uttar Pradesh, and its filing with the UGC's Distance Education Bureau describes its territorial jurisdiction as Within State under both its Act and the 2020 regulations. The university reports 12 Regional Centres and 1,433 Learner Support Centres across the state. The 2026-27 brochure also notes that, under the bureau's rules, admission of foreign students remains suspended.

Who Rajarshi Tandon Was

The name honours Purushottam Das Tandon, who was born in Prayag on 1 August 1882 and died there on 1 July 1962, according to the university's biography of him. The same account records that he was first elected Speaker of the United Provinces assembly in 1937, served as president of the Indian National Congress in 1950, was given the title Rajarshi on 15 April 1948 on the banks of the Saryu, and received the Bharat Ratna in 1961. His lifelong cause was Hindi: he was the first secretary of the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan when it was founded in 1910, and the biography credits his efforts for the Constituent Assembly's 1949 acceptance of Hindi in Devanagari script.

UGC Recognition: Which Programmes Are Covered, and Until When

UPRTOU's standing with the Distance Education Bureau is set programme by programme, and its list has shifted between orders: the 2023-24 order named 29 UPRTOU programmes, the B.Ed. among them. The latest order the university has posted is the bureau's letter F.No. 1-6/2025 (DEB-NER) of 2 April 2025, which recognises 28 UPRTOU programmes from the July-August 2023 session to 2027-28, up to January 2028 only, and sets separate windows for five more.

Three groups in the 2026-27 brochure need a closer look, because the public record does not yet match what is being offered:

• B.Ed. The 2025 order covers only the February and July-August 2025 intakes. UPRTOU's application to the bureau for 2026-27, submitted in May 2026, seeks recognition for the B.Ed. along with M.A. Mathematics, M.Sc. Botany, M.Sc. Zoology and M.A. Public Administration, while its recognition page posts letters for 2023-24 and 2024-25 only. No 2026-27 order has been posted there, even though B.Ed. counselling for 2026-27 is under way.
• M.A. Mathematics, M.Sc. Botany, M.Sc. Zoology and M.A. Public Administration. All four carry fees in the 2026-27 brochure, and none appears in the 2023 or 2025 orders; they are the programmes named in the pending application.
• BCA and M.A. Home Science. A notice of February 2026 says the university has restarted the BCA and M.A. (Home Science) from the January 2026 session. The bureau's programme list shows both recognised against UPRTOU for 2020-21 to 2022-23, and neither in any later year, and neither is named in the 2023 or 2025 orders.

The nutrition degrees run the other way: they are inside the 2025 order's window, yet the university suspended them. An admission section notice dated 30 December 2025 says that, following the bureau's directions and in addition to M.Sc. Food Nutrition, M.Sc. Biochemistry and B.Sc. Human Nutrition, seven nutrition and child-care diplomas, certificates and awareness programmes were suspended from the July 2025 session, and it asks learners admitted to those seven to return their study material so the admission fee can be refunded. The bureau's list shows those three degrees against UPRTOU up to 2024-25 and not for 2025-26.

Two limits of the record are worth knowing. Every UPRTOU entry in the bureau's orders and list is a degree, so they say nothing either way about the brochure's diplomas, certificates and awareness courses. And the list carries no online-mode entry for UPRTOU in any year: its programmes are recognised in open and distance learning mode only.

The 2026-27 brochure prices each programme per year, and the rupee figure is the admission fee for that year alone, so a three-year B.A. is paid three times. Study material is in Hindi for most arts and education subjects and in English for the sciences, computing and management.

One-year diplomas in subjects such as rural development, yoga, karmakand and human resource management cost Rs 6,000 a year, with the diploma in museology at Rs 12,000; six-month certificates, among them human rights, GST and a certificate in Kumbh studies, are Rs 3,000; and non-credit awareness programmes are Rs 1,000. On top of the programme fee, the brochure adds a registration fee of Rs 500, an examination fee of Rs 150 per paper and Rs 800 for a change of examination centre, and all fees are paid online only.

The printed study material is no longer optional. For the July 2026 session the university removed the SLM option, so every applicant pays the full fee including printed material, and an applicant who takes the soft copy instead gets a 15% refund of the admission fee, provided a written request with bank details is sent to the admission in-charge within 7 days of admission being confirmed.

A learner who withdraws is refunded on a sliding scale: 100% if the application is withdrawn 15 days or more before the notified last date, 90% if less than 15 days before it, 80% up to 15 days after it, 50% between 15 and 30 days after it, and nothing after 30 days, with Rs 1,000 kept as a processing charge.

For everything except the B.Ed., B.Ed. (Special Education) and M.A. Yoga, UPRTOU admits on eligibility alone: there is no test, and the date the online form is submitted decides the session. The brochure sets two windows, 1 July to 15 September for the July session and 1 January to 15 March for the January session, and says forms are filed on the Samarth admission portal at uprtouadm.samarth.edu.in. The MBA and MCA are admitted directly by the university on a first-come, first-served basis.

For July 2026 the deadline was moved at the last minute. The admission section's order of 7 September 2026 says direct admission to all programmes had been due to close on 7 September; it extended first-year admission to 14 September and second and third year admission and re-registration to 15 September 2026, after which admission for the July 2026-27 session closes completely. The home page headline gives only the first-year date, Last date is 14 Sep, 2026.

The brochure makes three points that trip applicants up:

• ABC and DEB IDs. Since 2024-25 every admission runs through Samarth, and the applicant must complete the Academic Bank of Credits ID and the UGC-DEB ID registration personally.
• Wrong information costs the fee. If an applicant is later found ineligible or to have given false details, admission is cancelled at any stage and the fee is not refunded.
• Sessions do not mix. A learner admitted in July continues to the second and third year only in later July sessions, and a January learner only in January sessions.

The B.Ed. is a different programme with a different gate. It is open to candidates who have completed an NCTE-recognised teacher education course in face-to-face mode, or trained teachers working in an elementary or primary school, with at least 50% in a bachelor's or master's degree, or 55% for engineering or technology graduates. Selection is by the university's entrance test. For 2026-27 the entrance fee was Rs 2,000 for general and backward-class candidates, Rs 2,500 with late fee, and Rs 1,000 for SC and ST candidates, and those called to counselling pay a further Rs 600, or Rs 300 for SC and ST candidates of Uttar Pradesh.

The 2026-27 test cycle opened for registration on 27 June 2026, closed on 17 July 2026, with the exam date set as 07 Aug 2026. Reservation follows Uttar Pradesh government rules, including horizontal reservation for candidates with a disability of 40% or more, and reservation for women, dependants of freedom fighters, and defence personnel or their dependants.

Only the entrance-based programmes produce anything like a cutoff, and UPRTOU does not publish a closing-rank table for them. The B.Ed. and B.Ed. (Special Education) results are posted as a BAT/SBAT Entrance Result 2026, uploaded on 11-08-2026, and candidates are then called to counselling at the Atal auditorium on the Saraswati campus in rank bands, round by round. Those notices are posted as scanned images, and they give the rank band called, not the rank at which seats ran out: the revised schedule for the round on 14 September 2026 lists the bands called by category for each degree and the centres where seats were still open. An applicant to the B.A., the MBA or an M.A. other than Yoga meets an eligibility line, never a rank.

UPRTOU has a Training and Placement Cell staffed by faculty from several schools, and it has advertised campus placement drives through the Uttar Pradesh government's Rojgaar Sangam portal. The only outcome numbers come from the university's own data filed with NIRF for the 2026 cycle, which NIRF has not scored or published in a ranking table.

Read these figures with care. The same filing reports zero students placed at every programme level in 2022-23 and 2023-24. For the three-year undergraduate degrees, which carry the largest enrolment, its 2024-25 row stops after the 7,247 students registered for the examination, with no graduating, placement or salary figures. The brochure lets learners study while employed in a government or private organisation, and the filing does not say whether a job held before enrolment was counted as a placement.

The 2026-27 brochure sets no seat limit for the open-entry programmes. The two teacher-education degrees have one, and both are capped at the same total. The B.Ed. has 500 seats plus 50 EWS seats, taught at 13 study centres, two of them in Prayagraj and one each in Agra, Jaunpur, Baghpat, Balrampur, Lucknow, Ambedkar Nagar, Varanasi, Kanpur, Bhadohi, Pratapgarh and Jhansi. The B.Ed. (Special Education) also has 500 seats plus 50 EWS seats, spread over 11 study centres at 50 each including EWS, run under a no-objection certificate from the Rehabilitation Council of India in intellectual and developmental disability, hearing impairment and visual impairment.

For the university as a whole, its NIRF filing gives a sanctioned intake for 2024-25 by programme length.

UPRTOU's ranking record is one year long: the 2025 edition was the first open university table to carry its name, and it came third of the three names printed.

The 2025 table prints only an institute ID, name, city, state and rank, with no score for any of the three institutions. The 2024 table was a different field: Indira Gandhi National Open University, Netaji Subhash Open University and Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar Open University. In its October 2024 application to the bureau, for the session beginning January 2025, UPRTOU entered its NIRF ranking for 2022, 2023 and 2024 as NotApplicable. It has filed data for the 2026 cycle, but no 2026 open university table is on the NIRF site so far.

The Prayagraj headquarters is spread over three campuses, Ganga, Saraswati and Yamuna, and the building statement filed with the university's 12-B papers dates each building. The administrative block on Ganga campus was completed on 21-12-2010, the central library on Saraswati campus on 05-09-2015 and the auditorium there on 04-03-2021, and regional office buildings have gone up at Bareilly, Lucknow and Kanpur.

In its filing with the bureau the university reports 1,71,433 square feet of built-up area for distance learning, against the 15,000 required. The central library, Yagyavalkya Granthalaya, started in 2000 with 279 books and now holds 44,387 volumes and 92 learned journals.

For most learners the facility that matters is a study centre, not Prayagraj. Counselling classes run at the government and private colleges the university has made study centres across the state, grouped under 12 regional centres at Prayagraj, Bareilly, Gorakhpur, Varanasi, Lucknow, Ghaziabad, Meerut, Jhansi, Kanpur, Agra, Ballia and Ayodhya.

The university set up a Centre for Online Education on 06.07.2022, which runs the e-Gyanaarjan learning management system, live classes and e-SLMs. Its NIRF filing, however, reports 0 programmes converted from distance to online mode and 0 courses developed on SWAYAM, so the centre supports distance learners rather than offering separate online degrees. The same filing states that more than 80% of buildings have lifts or ramps and accessible toilets. The university's public self-disclosure page links a Hostel Details entry whose page carries only the heading and two images that fail to load, so accommodation for a learner visiting Prayagraj cannot be confirmed from its site.

The faculty list in UPRTOU's NIRF 2026 submission runs to 89 names: 4 at director or dean level, 14 professors and 71 assistant professors, with no associate professors. Of the 89, 25 are regular appointments and 64 are ad hoc or contractual.

Set against the enrolment the same filing reports, 33,302 students in three-year UG programmes and 27,675 in two-year PG programmes, most learners' teaching contact is with academic counsellors at their study centre, and the filing gives the number of counsellors centre by centre. For the programmes in its October 2024 application, the university declared this assessment pattern to the bureau: 30% continuous assessment and 70% end-semester examination, with 36% as the pass mark. For doctoral work, the filing reports 71 full-time and 10 part-time Ph.D. scholars and no Ph.D. awarded in the three years to 2024-25.

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