Uttar Banga Krishi Viswavidyalaya

Uttar Banga Krishi Vishwavidyalaya is an agricultural university in Pundibari about 15 km northwest of Cooch Behar, West Bengal, India. It has faculties of horticulture, agriculture and agricultural engineering.Background and historyThe northern part of West Bengal is endowed with diverse natural resources like forest, economic plant resources, agro-ecosystem, etc., with extremely responsive rural communities. It comprises old alluvial, terai and hill zones distributed in six northern districts of West Bengal (Cooch Behar, Jalpaiguri, Darjeeling, Malda, Dakshin Dinajpur and Uttar Dinajpur).The economy of this part of West Bengal is predominantly agrarian, and agriculture is characterised by low productivity and subsistence farming with a limited number of crops due to inherent soil-climatic and agro-ecological conditions. Improved technologies befitting the agro-climatic and socio-economic characteristics of this region is an important issue.Keeping this perspective in view, the state government established a satellite campus of the State Agriculture University, Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya at Pundibari, in Cooch Behar district in 1979. Since then the Indian Council of Agricultural Research has accredited the campus and extended development support. A notable change in agricultural and horticultural crop production, productivity and cropping pattern in North Bengal became perceptible from the late 1980s onwards.