Which of the following is the first University established in 1951 exclusively…

Concept: In India the word “university” is a legal status, not a description of a campus. A body becomes a university only when a statute creates or recognises it — a Central Act, a State Act, or deemed-to-be-university status conferred under Section 3 of the UGC Act, 1956. So the year a teaching institution opens its doors and the year it becomes a university are usually different years, and it is the statute that fixes the second one. A women’s university is one whose enabling statute restricts admission to women.

Application: The social reformer Dhondo Keshav Karve founded the Indian Women’s University at Pune in 1916 for the express purpose of educating women, and an endowment from the Thackersey family gave it the name Shreemati Nathibai Damodar Thackersey (SNDT). For its first three and a half decades it taught and examined its own students without statutory university status. That changed in 1951, when the institution received statutory recognition as a university. That 1951 recognition is exactly what the stem means by “established in 1951” — the year an institution already teaching women since 1916 became a university in law, and the first one anywhere in India open exclusively to women.

Cross-check — why the other institutions do not fit the two conditions in the stem:

• Banasthali Vidyapith, Tonk satisfies “exclusively for women” but not the year: it was founded in 1935 by Hiralal and Ratan Shastri and was granted deemed-to-be-university status in 1983, more than three decades after 1951.

• Kashi Vidyapeeth, Benaras was founded in 1921 at Varanasi as a nationalist alternative to government colleges during the non-cooperation movement, and it is co-educational — so it fails both conditions.

• Savitribai Phule Pune University was set up in 1949 under the Poona University Act and is co-educational; the name honours Savitribai Phule (adopted in 2014) but the institution itself was never women-only.

Result: The university that acquired university status in 1951 exclusively for women is SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai — the first women’s university in India and in South-East Asia, with its headquarters at Churchgate and further campuses at Juhu, Mumbai and Karve Road, Pune.