The All India Council Of Technical Education (AICTE) has approved to provide the new 842 institutions with additional 57,747 new pharmacy courses. This decision now leads to a total of 2,62,698 diploma, undergraduate and postgraduate seats in 3,726 pharmacy institutes this year.
As per AICTE, the distribution of seats in the 842 new colleges is such that the 589 new institutes will be offering diploma programs. Whereas the 253 new institutes will offer undergraduate and postgraduate courses.
Coming to the distribution of the new colleges in the states, Uttar Pradesh will be getting the highest number of new Pharmacy colleges. In Karnataka, there will be 16 new Pharmacy colleges that will have a total of 1,040 new seats.
In the last academic session, the number of Pharmacy seats in the country was 67,179 across 1,078 pharmacy institutes. Now the addition of the new seats and institutes the number of UG and PG seats in total rises to 1,57,609 from 1,37,772.
The increase in the number of seats in Pharmacy is wise as per the experts. They say that the demand for the course is not less. Last year too, there were no pharmacy seats vacant. There is a great scope in the industry in pharmacy research and marketing sector.
The data says that the ratio of the students and the number of pharmacy seats last year was 121:100. This clearly shows that the number of students per seat is quite more. In addition to that, the number of application in the newly opened pharmacy colleges in the states like UP and Maharashtra have seen a noticeable rise.
Coming to the top Pharmacy colleges of the nation we have Jamia Hamdard, Panjab University, National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research, Institute of Chemical Technology, Birla Institute of Technology & Science, National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research, Manipal College of Pharmaceutical Sciences and many more. These colleges have been ranked the top Pharmacy colleges of the nation as per the NIRF 2019 rankings.
To take admission in pharmacy courses the candidates can appear for the national entrance exam like the Graduate Pharmacy Aptitude Test (GPAT). In addition to that many top universities intake admission in the pharmacy courses based on the performance of the candidates in their entrance exams.