Delhi hasn’t opened a new arts, science, or commerce college since 1995 – an RTI reveals why this year’s DU admission crunch is worse than ever, and whether Veer Savarkar College could finally change that.
As DU’s admission season unfolds, the Common Seat Allocation System (CSAS) rush, seat allocation portals, and the cutoff stress for one of the most sought-after undergraduate systems in the country all tell a familiar story. But an RTI reply has revealed a less familiar one: Delhi University has not opened a new conventional arts, science, or commerce college in 31 years.
The last time it did was in 1995, with the founding of Bhaskaracharya College of Applied Sciences (BCAS) in Dwarka. Every institution added to DU since then has been a specialised professional college: nursing schools, a dental institute, a physiotherapy college, not a general undergraduate college of the kind that defines DU’s core identity.
This year, 2,73,751 candidates registered for DU’s undergraduate admissions. Of these, 2,18,284 completed Phase 1 of the process, and 2,08,043 locked in their programme and college preferences.
Against this, DU’s 69 colleges and departments offer just 71,624 seats across 73 programmes, meaning roughly 3.8 registered applicants for every seat, or close to three serious contenders per seat.
The RTI data maps DU’s growth across three phases:
1881–1946 (8 colleges): The founding era gave DU the colleges whose names still carry weight in every admission conversation today, St Stephen’s (1881), Hindu College (1899), Ramjas (1917), Indraprastha College for Women (1924), Zakir Husain Delhi College (1925), and Shri Ram College of Commerce (1926).
1947–2000 (76 colleges): Post-independence India expanded DU at a pace it has never matched since. Hansraj College and Miranda House opened in 1948; Lady Shri Ram College for Women in 1956; Kirori Mal College in 1957; Sri Venkateswara College in 1961; Gargi College in 1967; Jesus and Mary College in 1968; Shaheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies in 1987; and Deen Dayal Upadhyaya College in 1990. This era closed with Bhaskaracharya College in 1995, DU’s last conventional undergraduate college.
2001–2019 (just 7 institutions): In the two decades after 1995, only seven institutions were added to the cohort, and every one was a professional healthcare, education, or rehabilitation college: the School of Rehabilitation Sciences (2002), Durgabai Deshmukh College of Special Education (2006), Holy Family College of Nursing (2011), Maulana Azad Institute of Dental Sciences (2013), and Florence Nightingale College of Nursing (2019) among them.
Since 2014, DU has added exactly one institution: Florence Nightingale College of Nursing in 2019. Like every addition before it, stretching back to 1995, it too was a specialised healthcare college, and not a single functional general undergraduate college was added.
This also traces an older separate episode: in 2020, then-Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal wrote to the Union Education Ministry asking it to amend Section 5(2) of the Delhi University Act, 1922, arguing that the Act’s requirement that all new Delhi colleges affiliate with DU had capped the university’s capacity for three decades and was shutting out lakhs of Class 12 graduates every year.
On January 3, 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone for Veer Savarkar College in Roshanpura, Najafgarh, alongside plans for new East (Surajmal Vihar) and West (Dwarka Sector 22) campuses.
Built at an estimated cost of ₹140 crore with 24 classrooms and a built-up area of over 18,800 square metres, it has been described by DU’s Vice-Chancellor Prof. Yogesh Singh as the university’s first new college in roughly three decades. And because the college was not yet operational when the RTI data was compiled, it doesn’t appear in the RTI’s count.
According to recent reporting, Veer Savarkar College may begin functioning this academic year, but not from its own building, since campus construction is still incomplete.
DU is reportedly planning to run its first-year classes out of Deen Dayal Upadhyaya College’s campus instead, with DU’s administration having already agreed to the arrangement pending formal university approval. If this goes ahead, it would be the first addition to DU’s conventional undergraduate seat count since 1995.
Arshia Sharma
Image Source: DU Beat
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