Chandigarh University: Founder who admires PM Modi, youngest varsity to debut in QS World Rankings

According to RS Bawa, pro-chancellor, Chandigarh University, there are around 30,000 students, including international students from 54 countries, currently enrolled at the varsity.

From agriculture to the education sector

Established in 2012, Chandigarh University was founded by Satnam Singh Sandhu, a Sikh entrepreneur and philanthropist who is also its chancellor and admires Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He is also the patron of Chandigarh Welfare Trust (CWT) and New India Development (NID) Foundation—two NGOs working on community welfare projects in Chandigarh.

Once an agriculturist, Sandhu forayed into the education sector in 2001 and established the Chandigarh Group of Colleges (CGC) at Landran in Mohali. He never joined any political party.

A day before the video fiasco rocked CU, Sandhu celebrated Modi’s 72nd birthday by organising a mega-health camp in Chandigarh, which was inaugurated by Punjab Governor Banwari Lal Purohit and also attended by Union Minister and senior BJP leader Smriti Irani. The CWT and NID Foundation were the main organisers of the camp.

Sandhu’s admiration for Modi has never been a secret. He had led a delegation of Sikh NRIs and prominent members Punjabi community which met the prime minister in April this year under the “Sadbhavna programme” in Delhi. “Our PM Modi has shown a very big heart by organising Sadbhavna event for Sikhs and spending time with us,” Sandhu had said after meeting Modi. 

Sandhu (left) had led a delegation of Sikh community to meet PM Modi in April this year. (Express Photo)

The founders

From a small village in Ferozepur to one of the fastest growing private varsities of Asia, it’s been a meteoric rise for Sandhu and Rashpal Singh Dhaliwal, the co-founders of Chandigarh University.

Both Sandhu and Dhaliwal, who hail from farming families in the hinterland far from the capital, take great pride in their humble origins. The partners, who are in their fifties, often tell journalists they studied in ramshackle government schools where classes were usually held under kikar trees while they sat on sacks they got from home. Raised in Rasulpur village of Ferozepur, Sandhu, who is the face of Chandigarh University, met Dhaliwal in Moga where he had come for his graduation. Dhaliwal, a few years older, soon ventured into politics, and Sandhu was by his side, helping him out as he was elected chief of the local civic body in 1995.

Dhaliwal says politics did not suit them but it did help them open many doors. Education was one of them. Sandhu says though he did not get the education he desired, he learnt a lot from his farmer father and grandfather. “My grandfather would make me read the daily paper from end to end, including the editorials… Soon, I became fascinated with the field of education.” A trip down south where he came across many private engineering colleges made him resolve to set up a similar institute in the state. 

Despite belonging to the interiors of the Malwa region, they decided to set up an engineering college at Landran in Kharar, on the outskirts of the capital city of Chandigarh. It was on a chilly December day in 2000 that they laid the foundation stone of their college on three-acre land with a loan of Rs 95 lakh. They started with Bachelor of Computer Application (BCA) and Master of Computer Application (MCA) courses with around 100 students in the first batch.

The two friends remember how many well-wishers thought it was a big misadventure, for then Landran was a scraggy town surrounded by villages, with poor connectivity to Chandigarh. But Sandhu says he knew this area would eventually boom due to its proximity to Chandigarh, around 15 km away. Repaying the loan was not easy, Dhaliwal recalls they borrowed from friends to pay their instalments. But soon the courses started doing well, and they expanded to neighbouring Jhanjeri and Gharuan where they eventually set up Chandigarh University in 2012. Among their new initiatives is the mandatory 30 hours of social work as a precondition for any degree.

The partners, who call each other brothers, work as a team with Sandhu focusing on education and Dhaliwal on infrastructure and finances. 

Debut in QS World Rankings 

Released in June this year, QS World Rankings had just 41 educational institutions from India featuring on it. And, Chandigarh University broke into the QS World University Rankings for the first time. It was the highest ranked institution from Punjab, and was placed above state-owned Panjab University (PU). While CU was placed in the 800-1000 bracket, PU was in the 1201-1400 bracket.

Chandigarh University also performed well in the National Institutional Rankings Framework (NIRF), released by the Union Ministry of Education, jumping from 77th overall rank in 2021 to 48th in 2022. It was the highest-ranked private university from Punjab, and was placed after government-run institutes such as IIT Ropar (35), PU (41), and IISER Mohali (47). It also ranked higher than other well-established, older private institutions in Punjab—Thapar Institute of Engineering, Patiala; Lovely Professional University (LPU), Phagwara, and even two government-run GNDU, Amritsar and NIT Jalandhar—in the overall category.

In the “universities” category, CU was placed 29th, the second in Punjab after PU, which was placed 25th. 

Row over name, famous visitors

A row had also erupted over the name of Chandigarh University when a subcommittee of Panjab University had objected that a private varsity cannot use names of states or Union Territories for private purposes without permission of authorities as “it was causing confusion among the students”. It decided to take a legal opinion on the issue. 

Apart from Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann, who had visited CU to inaugurate the state’s first drone hub in April this year, the university has hosted several known figures in the past few years.

Tibetan spiritual leader and Nobel laureate Dalai Lama, former president Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, African Nobel laureate Prof (Dr) Wole Soyinka, film director Mahesh Bhatt, former CEO of the IBM group Ginni Rometty, cricketer Virender Sehwag, actors Akshay Kumar and Katrina Kaif among others have also visited the university. The Art of Living founder and spiritual leader Sri Sri Ravi Shankar had also visited the campus with Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt to take part in the ‘Drugs-Free India’ campaign.