Vinayaka Missions Research Foundation, Salem

Vinayaka Mission's Research Foundation, still widely called Vinayaka Mission University, Salem, is a private deemed-to-be university with colleges in Salem, Chennai, Puducherry and Karaikal. Its only numbered place in the government's 2025 rankings is 99th in pharmacy, and that rank rests on one unit: Vinayaka Mission's College of Pharmacy on the Yercaud Main Road in Salem, the college the whole group grew out of.

The medical, dental, engineering and nursing colleges share the university's name, but the fees, seats and NIRF data below belong to the pharmacy college alone.

Official records name the university in several ways, and all of them refer to the same body. Its own about page uses Vinayaka Mission's Research Foundation (Deemed to be University), shortened to VMRF(DU). The University Grants Commission's consolidated list of deemed universities prints Vinayaka Mission's Research Foundation at Sankari Main Road, Ariyanoor, Salem. The AISHE higher-education survey spells it "VINAYAKA MISSIONs RESEARCH FOUNDATION, SALEM", where the lower-case "s" is a typing slip for the possessive. Older notices, like the distance education site, still say Vinayaka Missions University.

Its legal footing is Section 3 of the UGC Act rather than a state university law. The university's history says the Ministry of Human Resource Development declared it a deemed university in 2001 under Section 3 of the UGC Act, 1956, on the UGC's recommendation. For a pharmacy applicant, that means the B.Pharm degree carries VMRF's name rather than that of the Tamil Nadu Dr. M.G.R. Medical University, while the Pharmacy Council of India still decides each course's intake.

Do not confuse it with Vinayaka Missions Sikkim University in Tadong, East Sikkim, which appears as a separate institution with its own pharmacy college in the Pharmacy Council of India's approved-institutions list. The same PCI list also carries unrelated Vinayaka pharmacy colleges at Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh, Garsa in Himachal Pradesh and Hatod in Madhya Pradesh.

How the University Grew From a Pharmacy College

The group began with pharmacy. The trust behind it, Thirumuruga Kirupananda Variyar Thavathiru Sundara Swamigal Medical Educational and Charitable Trust, was formed in 1981, and founder-chairman Dr. A. Shanmugasundaram opened Vinayaka Mission's College of Pharmacy at Salem in 1982, according to the university's history. That 1982 date is the establishment year AISHE carries for the whole university.

The records disagree by a year at the college level. The college's own site says it was established in 1982 with a Diploma in Pharmacy, while the university's pharmacy page says 1981, with the diploma starting in 1982. Both agree on what came later: B.Pharm from 1993, M.Pharm from 2003 and Pharm.D and Pharm.D (Post Baccalaureate) from 2009, with the college's site adding doctoral work in pharmacy from 2004.

University status came in stages. The NAAC self-study report submitted in February 2021 says the university began in 2001 with 3 constituent colleges, and 10 more were brought under it in 2004. Today its about page counts 14 colleges and 13 schools, including 3 medical colleges, 2 engineering colleges and 1 pharmacy college.

Which Campus the Pharmacy Rank Belongs To

VMRF is spread across four locations, and pharmacy is taught at only one of them. The university's list of Salem constituent colleges names eleven units there, from Vinayaka Mission's Kirupananda Variyar Medical College to the College of Physical Education, and Vinayaka Mission's College of Pharmacy is one of them. The Chennai campus, the Puducherry campus and the Karaikal campus have no pharmacy college, since the university's own count of pharmacy colleges is one.

The NIRF filing confirms it. VMRF's pharmacy submission, ID IR-P-U-0492, is listed with the city Salem in the 2025 pharmacy table, and the intakes it reports, 100 for the four-year undergraduate programme and 30 for the six-year programme in the 2025 data file, are the B.Pharm and Pharm.D intakes on the pharmacy college's fee table.

Even within Salem, the pharmacy college is not at the university headquarters. Its homepage gives the address as Yercaud Main Road, Kondappanaickenpatti, Salem 636008, in the foothills below Yercaud. The university's administrative office is at Sankari Main Road (NH-47), Ariyanoor, Salem 636 308, per the VMRF homepage, a separate site from the college. Clinical training for pharmacy students is linked to Vinayaka Mission's Kirupananda Variyar Medical College and Hospital at Seeragapadi, which the Pharmacy Council's 2024-25 decision letter names as the hospital for the Pharm.D courses.

The pharmacy college runs six programmes, from a two-year diploma to a six-year doctorate, and the university publishes a tuition figure for each of them for 2026-27. The fees below are tuition per year, payable in two instalments, from the university's pharmacy page.

Pharm.D is the most expensive course at the college by a wide margin. At Rs 2,60,000 a year for six years, it costs almost twice the B.Pharm rate of Rs 1,40,000. The fee page quotes tuition only and lists no hostel, mess, examination or transport charge.

The M.Pharm menu has shrunk. The college's About page still describes M.Pharm in 7 specialisations and the university page says five, but the 2026-27 fee table lists only Pharmaceutics, Pharmaceutical Analysis and Pharmacology, at 15 seats each. The same three are the only M.Pharm branches in the college's admissions table, even though the M.Pharm description further down that page still names six, adding Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Pharmaceutical Biotechnology and Pharmacognosy & Phytochemistry. None of those three has a seat or a fee for 2026-27.

B.Pharm (Practice), a bridge course for diploma holders, has also dropped off. The Pharmacy Council approved 40 admissions to it for 2024-2025, and the course is missing from the 2026-27 fee table.

For refunds, the university's refund policy follows UGC and AICTE rules, wants a cancellation request in writing and pays refunds only by RTGS or NEFT. Before enrolment the central admission office handles refunds; after enrolment you have to go to the college itself.

Pharmacy admission at VMRF goes through the university's own counselling, not Tamil Nadu's. The university's admission policy gives one Admission Monitoring Committee the power to run joint counselling for every programme on all four campuses. The Tamil Nadu Selection Committee's 2026-27 B.Pharm prospectus covers only the B.Pharm course of the Tamil Nadu Dr. M.G.R. Medical University, in government colleges and in government-quota seats at self-financing colleges. VMRF's B.Pharm is its own degree, so the state rounds are not a route into this college.

The policy sets a different route for each pharmacy course:

• D.Pharm and B.Pharm: merit counselling on Class 12 marks, subject to PCI eligibility.
• B.Pharm lateral entry: marks in the Diploma in Pharmacy; the pharmacy page asks for 50% aggregate across both diploma years.
• Pharm.D and Pharm.D (Post Baccalaureate): merit counselling on marks in the qualifying examination.
• M.Pharm: the All India Entrance Examination conducted by VMRF, followed by counselling.

VMRF's pharmacy page spells out English as a separate Class 12 requirement for D.Pharm and B.Pharm but leaves it out of the Pharm.D entry, which names only the science subjects. All three set the same age floor, 17 years completed by 31 December of the admission year, per the pharmacy page. M.Pharm needs a B.Pharm with 55% aggregate (50% for SC and ST candidates) plus permanent registration with a State Pharmacy Council, and the post-baccalaureate Pharm.D asks B.Pharm graduates for that same council registration.

The printed rules and the 2026 cycle do not fully match. The written policy describes B.Pharm and Pharm.D selection on qualifying marks, but the university's 2026 entrance results page carries score lookups for both a B.Pharm/Pharm.D entrance examination and an M.Pharm/Pharm.D (Post Baccalaureate) examination. Before you apply, ask the admission office (+91 427 2529700, per the VMRF homepage) whether the undergraduate test is compulsory or only used to rank applicants. Separately, the Pharm.D (Post Baccalaureate) entry on the pharmacy page says "Graduate Pharmacy Aptitude Test (GAT) qualified candidates will be given preference".

Ph.D admission follows a separate calendar, with sessions normally in April and October. According to the college admissions page, selection is 70% written entrance examination and 30% interview. Candidates holding UGC-NET, CSIR-NET, SLET or GATE skip the written test but still sit the interview.

VMRF publishes no closing mark or rank for any pharmacy course at the Salem college, and since the seats are filled through its own counselling, no state or central body releases one either. The 2026 results on its entrance results page are score lookups, where each candidate clicks through to view their own score. The VMRF homepage also carries a notice titled "Merit List of candidates who are called for Round 1 counselling" for M.Pharm and Pharm.D (Post Baccalaureate) in academic year 2025-26, but the notice points to a bare directory address rather than a file, and that address returns a Forbidden (access denied) error, so no names or marks from the list can be read.

What the university's own NIRF filings do show is how hard a seat is to get, and for the master's course it has not been hard. The 2025 data file records 23 first-year M.Pharm admissions in 2020-21 against an intake of 60, 22 against 30 in 2021-22 and 18 against 60 in 2022-23. The 2026 submission adds 32 admitted against 45 in 2023-24, after the intake was cut to 45. Pharm.D (Post Baccalaureate) took 5 of 10 in 2021-22 and 6 of 10 in 2022-23, per the same file.

With M.Pharm places left over in every one of those years, meeting the 55% B.Pharm eligibility bar on the pharmacy page has mattered more than outscoring other applicants.

B.Pharm and the six-year Pharm.D are fuller. The 2026 submission shows 100 first-year B.Pharm admissions against 100 seats in each of 2019-20, 2020-21 and 2021-22, and 30 of 30 Pharm.D places filled in 2019-20.

The only placement numbers published for the pharmacy college on its own are the cohort figures VMRF reports to NIRF itself, counting students who finished in the normal time. The newest, for students graduating in 2024-25, come from the data VMRF submitted for NIRF 2026 and has posted on its own site; earlier years are from the 2025 filing.

The B.Pharm median is the figure that changed most. It was Rs 3,00,000 for the class of 2023-24 and Rs 4,80,000 for the class of 2024-25, per the 2026 submission, while the share placed slipped slightly: 62 of 93 against 68 of 96 the year before. In 2024-25, 31 graduates chose further study, so every graduate in that class is accounted for in one column or the other. The oldest B.Pharm row in the 2025 file is weaker: of 108 who graduated in 2021-22, 43 were placed and 19 went on to study.

Every postgraduate and Pharm.D row in 2024-25 reports the same Rs 6,00,000 median, which is unusual enough to raise with the placement office before relying on it. The cohorts are also small, 6 students in the post-baccalaureate course and 29 in each of the other two, so one employer's offers can move a median a long way.

A highest package is published, but only for the whole university. VMRF's placement page shows 336+ companies visited, 1710+ offers and a maximum salary of 17.7 LPA, with no year and no split by college, so none of those figures can be read as a pharmacy result. No recruiter names appear there or on the college site. The college homepage lists a campus recruitment programme on 21-09-2024 and a finishing school for outgoing B.Pharm and M.Pharm students, and its event page for that drive carries only the title, without saying who hired or how many.

VMRF has not published a category-wise seat matrix for the college. The approved seat count is public, though, in the Pharmacy Council decision letter on VMRF's disclosure site and in the 2026-27 fee table.

The university's covering note on the PCI letter adds the courses up to 345 seats for 2024-25. The 10 B.Pharm lateral-entry places on the fee table have no line of their own in the PCI letter. The 2024-25 letter is the newest PCI approval on the university's recognition page, and the letter itself says course validity may be verified at pcionline.co.in.

Postgraduate enrolment has grown while B.Pharm has held steady. The 2026 submission counts 396 students across all four B.Pharm years, 179 in the six-year Pharm.D, 75 in M.Pharm and 29 in Pharm.D (Post Baccalaureate), against 49 M.Pharm and 18 post-baccalaureate students in the 2025 file.

The B.Pharm class also looks different on paper. In the 2025 file, 389 of 397 B.Pharm students came from within Tamil Nadu and 90 were women. In the 2026 submission, 304 of 396 are from the state and 188 are women. The university has not explained such a sharp shift in one year, so treat the newer split as reported rather than confirmed.

VMRF's only numbered NIRF place in 2025 is in pharmacy: 99th, with a score of 41.55, in the 2025 pharmacy table. It does not appear in the 2025 overall, university, engineering, medical or dental tables, bands included. In 2024 it was also placed in the 151-200 band of the university ranking, a band its about page still quotes.

The pharmacy rank fell even though the score went up.

The biggest lift came from perception, which covers how academic peers and employers rate an institution and rose from 9.17 in the 2024 table to 27.10 in the 2025 table. Teaching resources and research both slipped. A total of 41.55 was worth 99th in 2025, while 41.01 had been enough for 89th a year earlier, so ten more colleges finished above the Salem college despite its higher total. Research was the weakest measured area: the 2025 data file reports no sponsored research projects in 2023-24 or 2022-23, and 4 projects worth Rs 83000 in 2021-22.

The next ranking will judge newer numbers. In the data VMRF submitted for NIRF 2026, the college reports 6 sponsored projects from 3 funding agencies in 2024-25, worth Rs 575800, along with 8 patents published and 4 granted in calendar year 2024. Whether that lifts the research score depends on how the rest of the field moves.

VMRF does not appear in any NIRF pharmacy table from 2016 to 2023, the last of them the 2023 pharmacy ranking, which makes 89th in 2024 its first numbered pharmacy placing.

The pharmacy college has its own four-storey building of about 54000 sq. ft on the Yercaud Main Road campus, per its facilities page. The building holds ICT-enabled classrooms, teaching and research laboratories, a seminar hall, a computer centre and an auditorium seating 300.

The infrastructure page gives the room count as 8 lecture halls, 6 tutorial rooms, 20 laboratories and 2 research laboratories, plus a CPCSEA-approved animal house for pharmacology work and a medicinal garden.

The hostel is small next to the student body. The facilities page gives it room for 200, and the 2026 NIRF submission counts 396 B.Pharm and 179 Pharm.D students before the M.Pharm and diploma classes are added. Ask about a bed at the time you accept the seat. Hostel and mess charges are missing from both the college site and the university's 2026-27 fee table.

Laboratory spending swung sharply. The 2025 data file reports nothing spent on new laboratory equipment in 2023-24, and the 2026 submission reports Rs 3661120 in 2024-25, with library spending up to Rs 2275327 that year.

The 2026 NIRF submission lists 65 teachers by name, four of them marked as having left during 2024 and 2025. That compares with 63 faculty members in the 2025 file. The longest-serving is B. Jaykar, a professor who joined on 04-06-1984, and M. Kumar, who joined on 05-09-1990, is listed as dean or principal.

Much of the list is recent. A cluster of Pharm.D and M.Pharm holders joined between January and July 2024, among them three associate professors with Pharm.D degrees. Three B.Pharm graduates were appointed assistant professors on 30-04-2025, per the same submission.

Doctoral work has shifted towards full-time study. The 2025 file counted 5 full-time and 94 part-time Ph.D scholars, and the 2026 submission counts 26 full-time and 75 part-time. Consultancy has grown faster still, from 12 projects worth Rs 356455 in 2023-24 to 26 projects for 12 client organisations worth Rs 3531400 in 2024-25, per that submission.

R. Kothai, listed as associate dean, was named Best Women Pharmacy Teacher of the Year for 2026 by the Tamil Nadu branch of the Association of Pharmaceutical Teachers of India, according to the college's homepage.

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