Lovely Professional University, Punjab

The first private university in the state of Punjab and the largest single-campus university in India, Lovely Professional University, Punjab offers 200 study programmes to 30,000 students from across India and abroad

Sited on a sprawling 600-acre lush green campus on National Highway No. 1 linking Delhi with Jalandhar (Punjab), Lovely Professional University (LPU, estb. 2001 as Lovely Institute of Management and conferred varsity status in 2006) is the first private university of the state of Punjab (pop. 27 million). Advertised as the largest single-campus university in India, LPU offers 200 programmes across the faculties of technology and science, business and applied arts, applied medical sciences, education and humanities, distance education and international programmes at the intermediate, graduate, postgraduate and doctorate levels to 30,000 students from across India and 26 countries worldwide.

Despite its somewhat unimaginative nomenclature, over the past decade since it was promoted, Lovely Professional University, Punjab has won plaudits as a top-ranked provider of professional education. For instance the Financial Express ranked LPU among India’s Top 5 private universities (2009); a NASSCOM-Booz Allen Hamilton survey ranked it among top 20 MCA institutes in India (2011); Competition Success Review among top 25 B-schools of excellence (2010), and Digital Learning as the best ICT-enabled university (2012). Moreover on October 3, LPU inaugurated its mint-new nine-storey wi-fi enabled Central Library sprawled over 1.5 lakh sq. ft, boasting 102,846 text and reference books, journals, magazines, audio, videos, CD-ROMs, research reports, online data-bases and data analysis software. Open 24/7 the state-of-the-art library also offers a cafeteria, separate group discussion rooms for students and staff members and an online resource centre with 400 computer terminals.

The growth and development of LPU into one of India’s top-ranked professional universities within the short span of a decade is testament to the extraordinary entrepreneurial drive of the late Baldev Raj Mittal (1931-2004), who began his career in Sujatnagar (Rajasthan), assisting his father in a sweetmeats shop, and later (1961) establishing the Lovely Sweets shop in Jalandhar cantonment to supply several Army units. The business of the Lovely Group flourished over the years under his elder sons Ramesh and Naresh (group chairman and vice chairman). After liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy in 1991, the youngest son Ashok promoted several retail showrooms for Bajaj Auto and Maruti-Suzuki under the name and style Lovely Autos (estb.1991).

Subsequently, exhibiting rare commitment to education, the late Baldev Mittal promoted the Lovely Institute of Management, Jalandhar in 2001 towards fulfilling his vision of “transforming education, transforming India”, with an investment of Rs.1 crore. “My late father persuaded the family that we need to provide the gift of education to society. Therefore in 2001 we promoted a B-school to deliver world-class education in sync with industry needs,’’ recalls the incumbent chancellor of LPU, Dr. Ashok Mittal, an alumnus of Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, with 25 years of experience of the automobile industry.

Following establishment of the Lovely Institute of Management under the aegis of the Lovely International Trust, several other institutions of professional education were promoted in quick succession — the Lovely Institute of Technology (2002), Lovely Institute of Pharmacy (2003), Lovely Institute of Architecture (2003), Lovely Institute of Education (2005) and Lovely Polytechnic (2007), initially affiliated to the Punjab Technical University. In recognition of the group’s rapid growth and diversification, in 2005 the Punjab state government enacted the Lovely Professional University Act 2005 with the Delhi-based University Grants Commission recognising LPU a year later. Starting with an initial batch of 240 students and 13 faculty in its B-school, currently the integrated LPU has 30,000 — including 1,400 foreign — students mentored by 3,700 faculty and staff.

Positioned as an outward-looking global institution, LPU has inked 35 international collaboration agreements with reputed varsities including North Dakota State University, University of Iowa (USA), Roehampton University (UK), Central Queensland University (Australia), Kuming University (China) and the Management Development Institute of Singapore, among others.

The university’s students and faculty are supported by excellent infrastructure — the landscaped campus houses 20 wi-fi enabled academic buildings with 500 access points as well as Smart classrooms and 11 libraries, including the recently launched air-conditioned Central Library and laboratories with 6,000 workstations. The university also offers an exclusive research centre with vice chancellor, Dr. Ramesh Kanwar — hitherto professor and chair of agricultural and biosystems engineering at Iowa University, USA and former consultant to the World Bank, European Commission, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and author of more than 500 published papers — as its head.

Unsurprisingly, the placement cell of LPU boasts recruitments from blue-chip corporates including Ashok Leyland, HCL, Google, HDFC, Infosys, TCS, Microsoft, Accenture, Axis Bank, Godrej, Wipro Infotech, and HSBC, among others.

A decade after the Lovely Group diversified into professional education, Ashok Mittal is beginning to think big. “Our objective is to grow LPU into a truly global university which will raise national standards of education in the process. Therefore our current focus is on world-class research, for which purpose we have tied up with the UK-India Research and Education Initiative. During our second decade, our focus will be on elevating teaching-learning standards to global norms,’’ he says.

Wouldn’t it be lovely!

Swati Roy (Delhi)