University of Hyderabad

The University of Hyderabad or UoH, casually called Hyderabad Central University, abbreviated as HCU is a central university for public research situated in Hyderabad, Telangana. The University which was founded in 1974 has a campus that is mostly residential. There are around 5000 students and 400 faculty from various disciplines on its campus. The chief rector of the university is the governor of Telangana, ex-officio though, and the President of India is the visitor to the university.

The university was set up according to the lines of the Six-Point Formula of 1973. Located in Gachibowli, spread over almost 2300 acres of land, the campus is home to more than 734 flowering plants, 220 species of birds, 15 species of reptiles, and 10 species of mammals. In 2015 January, the President of India awarded UoH as the Best Central University in the country. The University Grants Commission has declared the University as an Institute of Eminence or IoE following the Declaration of Government Institutions as Institutions of Eminence Guidelines, for public institutions, 2017. The UoH got 601-650 rank in the QS World University Rankings of 2020. National Institutional Ranking Framework ranked it at 6 in India among universities and at 15 in India overall in 2020. It features at the 2nd position in the rankings by India Today, amongst the top government universities in India.

The university’s semester calendar begins in the mid of July and goes till early-May. Almost 90 percent of the students are residential. The University offers a 2-year Master’s programme, an 18-month MPhil, and a 5-year long Ph.D. programme. The degrees on offer are integrated M.Sc., M.A., M.F.A., M.Tech., M.B.A., M.C.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. It is a post-graduate research university primarily. UoH sticks to the continuous assessment pattern – 40% of the marks is given through assignments spread across the semesters and 60% is through examinations at the end of the semesters. Medals are awarded to the toppers of the post-graduate courses.

The University being a public research university carries out heavy research activity in each department and awards nearly 300 doctorates every year. Research funding comes from UGC, DST, FIST, CSIR, DBT, and other agencies. High-quality research output in the field of social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences are what makes UoH stand out.

Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar laureate Rahul Banerjee, a renowned chemist in the field of organic chemistry did his doctoral studies from UoH under the guidance of Gautam Radhakrishna Desiraju, the TWAS laureate. Duddilla Sridhar Babu, a politician from INC and a member of the Telangana Assembly is an alumnus of the Nizam College under the University of Hyderabad. Padma Shri and Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Laureate Dipankar Chatterji, the molecular biologist known for bacterial transcription and bacterial stress response, joined the School of Life Sciences of UoH in 1978. Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar laureate G. Naresh Patwari, known for studies on molecular clusters, completed his M.Sc. from UoH in 1994. SSB laureate DumbalaSrinivasa Reddy, known for the Silicon-switch approach, got his Ph.D. in 2000 from the University of Hyderabad. Ganesh Bagler, known for the ground-breaking work in Computational Gastronomy, studied M.Tech. in Computational Techniques from UoH. Priyadarshi Pulikonda, the popular Tollywood actor and comedian obtained his post-graduate degree in Mass Communication from the University of Hyderabad.