The Viceregal Lodge Estate became the residence of the Viceroy of India until October 1933, when it was given to the University of Delhi.

[10] Members of the faculty included Daulat Singh Kothari in Physics and Panchanan Maheshwari in Botany.

[11] The silver jubilee year of the university in 1947 coincided with India's independence, and the national flag was hoisted in the main building for the first time by Vijayendra Kasturi Ranga Varadaraja Rao.

Twenty-five years later the golden jubilee celebrations of 1973 were attended by the then Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi, Satyajit Ray, Amrita Pritam, and M. S.

There are 16 faculties, 86 academic departments, 91 colleges spread across the city, with 132,435 regular students (114,494 undergraduates and 17,941 postgraduates).

DU's chemistry, geology, zoology, sociology, and history departments have been awarded the status of Centres of Advanced Studies.

[13] From the year 2022, DU changed its admission pattern from the 12th percentage mark based to CUET[14] (Common University Entrance Test).

And the 12th class percentage marks will act as a tie-breaker for students securing the same CUET scores.

[17] The annual honorary degree ceremony of the university has been conferred upon several people, which includes film actor Amitabh Bachchan, former Chief Minister of Delhi Sheila Dikshit, cartoonist R. K. Laxman, chemist C. N. R. Rao[18] and former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Gordon Brown.

The campus also houses centres for graduate study and research, which include the Cluster Innovation Centre, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi School of Journalism[21] and the Ambedkar Center for Biomedical Research (ACBR).

It moved to its present location on Benito Juarez Marg, near Dhaula Kuan, in 1984, and covers 69 acres.

Courses are mainly classified under the three faculties of the central university, including arts, commerce and science.

[50] Due to lack of surety in quality of legal education, The Bar Council of India has issued a notification asking Delhi University (DU) to shut down law courses offered in evening shift at its colleges.

DU has educated numerous foreign politicians and heads of state and government including State Counsellor of Myanmar Aung San Suu Kyi, third President of Malawi Bingu wa Mutharika, former Prime Minister of Nepal Girija Prasad Koirala, sixth President of Pakistan Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq,[74] sixteenth Prime Minister of Sri Lanka Harini Amarasuriya and two former Prime Ministers of Bhutan, Sangay Ngedup, and Khandu Wangchuk.

DU has also produced a large number of major actors and actresses of Indian cinema and theatre including Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, Manoj Bajpayee, Konkona Sen Sharma, Anurag Kashyap, Arjun Rampal, Imran Zahid, Neha Dhupia, Sakshi Tanwar, Mallika Sherawat, Imtiaz Ali, Huma Qureshi,[75] Siddharth, Sushant Singh Rajput, Shriya Saran, Vishal Bhardwaj, Sandhya Mridul, Aditi Rao Hydari, Shekhar Kapur, Deepa Mehta, Nimrat Kaur, Kabir Khan, Aditi Arya, Sidharth Malhotra and Triptii Dimri.

Singer Papon was also enrolled in Motilal Nehru College Notable DU alumni in poetry and literature include the Sahitya Akademi Award winning dramatist and playwright Harcharan Singh, the Urdu poet Akhtar ul Iman, and the writers Vikram Seth, Anita Desai (Shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times), Amitav Ghosh, Kunzang Choden, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Ali Sardar Jafri, and the Padma Vibhushan recipient Khushwant Singh.

Notable alumni in the sciences include physicist Archana Bhattacharyya,[76] theoretical physicist Pran Nath, SLAC physicist Jogesh Pati[77] particle physicist Amitava Raychaudhuri, astrophysicist Vinod Krishan,[78] chemists Charusita Chakravarty and Anil Kumar Tyagi,[79] engineer and "father of the pentium processor" Vinod Dham, mathematician Eknath Prabhakar Ghate, astrophysicist Sangeeta Malhotra, engineer Yogi Goswami, neurosurgeon B. K. Misra (1st Vice-President of World Federation of Neurosurgical Societies) ,[80] and biomaterials researcher Sanjukta Deb.

Notable alumni in the humanities and social sciences include First Deputy Managing Director of economics at IMF Gita Gopinath; economist and Senior Vice-president and Chief Economist of the World Bank Kaushik Basu; historians Arundhati Virmani, Ramnarayan Rawat, Upinder Singh and Usha Sanyal; professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University Veena Das; Kathak dancer Uma Sharma; Bharatnatyam dancer Geeta Chandran; gender rights activist Meera Khanna and IPS officer and politician Kiran Bedi[81][82] Notable alumni in the field of business include Tesla CFO Vaibhav Taneja, President of the World Bank- Ajay Banga and managing director and editor-in-chief of Republic Media Network Arnab Goswami.

Notable faculty members of DU include eminent historians like RS Sharma and Ramachandra Guha; recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences Amartya Sen; former Prime Minister of India Manmohan Singh; economist and a key architect of the Five-Year Plans of India Sukhamoy Chakravarty;[83] senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and professor of economics at Columbia University Jagdish Bhagwati;[84] and Ra'ana Liaquat Ali Khan, a leading woman figure in the Pakistan Movement and wife of the first Prime Minister of Pakistan Liaquat Ali Khan.