Uttar Pradesh has the highest number of colleges in India, says AISHE report

Uttar Pradesh has the highest number of colleges in India, followed by Maharashtra and Karnataka, according to the Centre's All India Survey for Higher Education (AISHE) 2021-22.

The AISHE survey was released by the Ministry of Education.

The top 10 states in terms of number of colleges in India include Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Telangana and West Bengal, each having at least 30 or more colleges per lakh population.

According to the survey report, in Uttar Pradesh, there are 8,375 colleges, up from 8,114 colleges in the previous year, and there are 30 colleges for every one lakh population.

Similarly, Karnataka has the highest number of colleges per lakh population (66) followed by Telangana (52), Andhra Pradesh (49), Himachal Pradesh (47), Puducherry (53) and Kerala (46).

"Maharashtra comes second with 4,692 colleges. Karnataka comes at the third position with 4,430 colleges whereas Rajasthan is at the fourth position with 3,934 colleges. Tamil Nadu comes at the fifth position with 2,829 colleges followed by Madhya Pradesh with 2,702 colleges,” the report said.

The survey report pointed out that more than 60 per cent of the 42,825 colleges taking part in the survey are general in nature, 8.7 per cent of the colleges are specialised in education or teacher education, 6.1 per cent of the colleges are engineering and technology institutions, 4.3 per cent nursing colleges and 3.5 per cent medical colleges.

While 2.7 per cent colleges offer arts courses, 2.4 per cent are dedicated to pharmacy courses, 0.7 per cent science colleges and 1.4 per cent Sanskrit colleges.

“Out of the 42,825 responding colleges, 14,197 colleges are offering PG programmes and 1,063 have PhD enrollments,” the report said.

Among districts, Bengaluru Urban district has the maximum number of colleges (1,106) followed by Jaipur (703), Hyderabad (491), Pune (475), Prayagraj (398), Rangareddy (349), Bhopal (344), Ghazipur (333), Sikar (330) and Nagpur (326).