Dibyendu Sarkar

Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya

The Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya (BCKV) with the headquarters at Mohanpur, Nadia was established in 1974 at Kalyani, Nadia. This University has already completed more than four decades of its establishment and made an important contribution towards the development of agricultural - education, research and extension. In the beginning, the university had two constituent faculties viz., Agriculture and Veterinary Sciences. Later on, in the year 1980, the North Bengal campus of BCKV was established at Pundibari, Cooch Behar, to cater agricultural education and research needs in the northern part of West Bengal where the agro-ecological characteristics are distinctly different from that in South Bengal where the main campus of the university is located. While the newly emerged University was engaged in the gradual rebuilding of various facilities in the different campuses, it was bifurcated to establish a new university, West Bengal University of Animal and Fishery Sciences, separating out the faculty of Veterinary Sciences in 1995. It was further split into two agricultural universities with the establishment of Uttar Banga KrishiViswavidyalaya (UBKV) in 2001 utilizing the infrastructural facilities of the erstwhile North Bengal Campus of B C K V and its other infrastructural facilities located in the districts of Cooch Behar, Jalpaiguri, Darjeeling, Malda, and North-and South-Dinajpur. At that time two new faculties viz., Faculty of Horticulture and Faculty of Agricultural Engineering were added to the existing Faculty of Agriculture under BCKV. In the recent past, the university has established two extended campuses of the faculty of Agriculture at Burdwan (in 2014) and at Bankura (in 2015) for teaching undergraduate studies in Agriculture.