Dr Rajendra Prasad Central Agricultural University, Samastipur

Most agricultural universities in India hand the Indian Council of Agricultural Research a 20% share of their bachelor's seats and fill the remainder through their own state counselling. Dr Rajendra Prasad Central Agricultural University hands over 100% of them. Almost everything a candidate has to plan for at Pusa follows from that one line in ICAR's counselling brochure: the rank that gets you in is an all-India rank, the hostel fills with students who are not from Bihar, and the university's own admission notice reads as a reporting instruction rather than an application form.

RPCAU is a central agricultural university on the Burhi Gandak river at Pusa, in Samastipur district of north Bihar. It was established on 7 October 2016, and owes its legacy to Rajendra Agricultural University, Pusa (1970) and Agricultural Research Institute, Pusa (1905), which is the university's own way of saying that an Act of Parliament converted the existing state agricultural university into a central one and seated it on the ground where organised agricultural research in India began. The 1905 institute is the one that later moved to Delhi and became IARI; what stayed at Pusa was the land, the bungalows and, eventually, a new university built on it.

The name matters to a student for a practical reason rather than a sentimental one. A central agricultural university is funded and governed from Delhi, its jurisdiction under the 2016 Act reaches the whole country with a special responsibility for Bihar, and its admissions are run nationally rather than by a state counselling authority. That is the difference a Bihar-domicile candidate feels most sharply, because it removes the home-state advantage that the same candidate would enjoy at a state agricultural university.

The estate is large and scattered. The university runs three campuses, at Pusa (Samastipur), Dholi (Muzaffarpur) and Piprakothi (East Champaran), 18 KVKs (16 under its direct control and 2 under technical control) and 4 research station spread over an area of 2063 acres, and the constituent colleges are split between Pusa and Dholi rather than gathered on one site. Where you are placed is decided after admission, by the university, not by the counselling that got you in.

Ten bachelor's degrees are taught, and the intake is weighted towards general agriculture without being swallowed by it. The university's own degree page carries the sanctioned figures.

Two of those ten are worth pausing on. Natural Farming and Food Nutrition and Dietetics are recent additions that very few universities in the ICAR system teach at all, and both carry small intakes, so a candidate who wants either has a short list of addresses in the country rather than a long one.

Postgraduate teaching is organised by discipline instead of by broad degree. Agronomy carries the largest master's intake at 22, followed by Genetics and Plant Breeding at 18, with Plant Pathology, Soil Science, Entomology and Agricultural Economics at 13 each; the two management degrees are the outliers, with MBA in Agri. Business Management at 51 and MBA (Rural Management) at 30. Doctoral intakes are deliberately tiny, most disciplines taking 2 to 5 research scholars a year.

On money, the figure a family actually needs is the one on the admission notice, not the one on the fee page. The notice issued for the current session sets what is deposited before reporting.

The previous session's notice carried the same table with the postgraduate and doctoral rows attached, and those rows have not been superseded by anything the university has published since: MBA (Agribusiness Management) Rs 61,735, MBA (Rural Management) Rs 71,735, all other master's programmes Rs 25,735 and all PhD programmes Rs 30,475 for the general category, each a few thousand rupees lower for SC and ST candidates.

The fee page itself is a different document with a different purpose, and reading it as the current price is the mistake most listing sites make. It publishes a per-semester schedule marked effective from 2018-19: tuition of Rs 2,000 a semester for undergraduates against a semester total of Rs 8,310, Rs 5,450 for postgraduates and Rs 6,410 for doctoral students, plus one-time heads and refundable deposits. The self-financed programmes sit on a separate line altogether, at Rs 42,000 a semester for either MBA and Rs 30,000 a semester for B.Tech Biotechnology, which is why the biotechnology row in the admission notice is roughly double every other undergraduate row.

How Do You Get Admission to RPCAU Pusa?

The university states the rule in a single sentence and allows no exception to it: admission to all the degree programmes shall be made through Competitive Entrance Examination conducted by Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). Pusa sets no entrance paper of its own, holds back no management quota and issues no application form a candidate could fill in directly; the university's part of the process starts only once ICAR has named the person.

That matters because of what it rules out. Neither JEE Main nor NEET opens a door here, including for the two B.Tech degrees, which candidates routinely assume are engineering-counselling seats. B.Tech Agricultural Engineering and B.Tech Biotechnology are allotted from the same ICAR list as B.Sc Agriculture, on the same score.

For bachelor's degrees the score is CUET (ICAR-UG), conducted by the National Testing Agency, and the allotment is ICAR's. Pusa is one of only five names the counselling brochure exempts from the share every other university surrenders: ICAR allots 20% seats (100% seats at ICAR-NDRI Karnal, ICAR-IARI New Delhi, ICAR-IVRI Izatnagar, RLBCAU, Jhansi and Dr. RPCAU, Pusa). The company on that line is instructive, three institutes the council runs itself and the younger central agricultural university at Jhansi, and it is why the seat matrix further down this page comes out of ICAR's brochure rather than off a state counselling portal. Allotment runs over four rounds and the mop-up round, if needed, with upgradation allowed only in the first three. One consequence catches candidates out every year: ICAR allots the university, not the college, and allotment of a constituent college of the university (which may be at different location from the main campus) allotted shall be regulated by the university itself. Accept a Pusa seat and you may be reporting to Dholi.

Master's and doctoral entry runs on the council's postgraduate paper. The College of Fisheries describes the route its own students take, and it is the university-wide pattern: admission to the M.F.Sc programmes is taken by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) through the ICAR-AIEEA (PG) examination, held annually by the National Testing Agency (NTA).

The reporting stage is where a provisional allotment becomes an admission, and the university runs it as a single physical event. Candidates provisionally admitted for the current session were required to report in person on 24th or 25th August 2026 at RPCAU, Pusa, Samastipur, Bihar, for document verification, admission and registration, with the fee deposited on or before 20.08.2026 and the transaction reference uploaded beforehand. Students who came through the mop-up round were allowed to pay at the counter instead.

The document list tells you exactly which system admitted you, because it asks for all three of its artefacts: the E-Admit Card (Issued by NTA), the Rank Card issued by ICAR and the Provisional Allotment Letter issued by ICAR. A medical fitness certificate from the Civil Surgeon is compulsory, a state-format caste certificate is refused where the central format is required, and an Academic Bank of Credits ID is expected at verification.

No closing rank for Pusa is published anywhere that can be treated as authoritative. ICAR runs the allotment on all-India merit in CUET (ICAR-UG), releases the result round by round, and does not put out a university-and-programme table of last ranks the way a state entrance commissioner does. Where a closing rank for Pusa is quoted anywhere, it has been assembled by a coaching portal out of what candidates said they scored, and it carries the authority of that method and no more.

What the university does file gives a sharper answer than a scraped rank anyway, because it shows how hard the seats are to fill. Its ranking-framework return records first-year undergraduate intake against students actually admitted: 370 sanctioned against 349 admitted in 2021-22, after 320 against 304 the year before. The postgraduate picture is looser still, with 278 first-year seats against 213 admitted in 2023-24.

Those two lines point a candidate in opposite directions. Undergraduate seats fill almost to capacity, so the all-India rank is the whole game and the mop-up round is a thin hope. Master's seats do not, so a candidate with a moderate AIEEA (PG) rank in a less crowded discipline has a real chance at Pusa that the same rank would not buy in a metropolitan institute.

The university's placement office states that the past record of students placement is around 100%. The numbers it files with the ranking framework do not support reading that as a job-placement rate, and a family weighing a four-year commitment should look at the filed table instead.

The bachelor's degree here behaves as a step rather than a destination. The higher-studies column beats the placed column in all three years, and in the best of them only 140 of 319 graduates were recorded as placed. The master's rows invert that: roughly half of each cohort is placed, and the median has climbed for two years running to Rs 7,50,000. If the plan is to earn from an agriculture degree rather than to compete for an ICAR fellowship, the postgraduate programme is where the money in this data actually appears.

The employers named by the placement office are banks, government organisations, research institutions and private and multinational companies, which is the ordinary spread for an agricultural university and reflects how many graduates sit competitive examinations rather than campus interviews. The office also runs the university's academic partnerships, including six European higher education institutions among them the University of East Anglia, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, the University of Milan, the Agricultural University of Athens and the University of Helsinki.

Because ICAR fills the entire undergraduate intake, the counselling brochure carries the reservation break-up seat for seat, which is unusual. The columns below are ICAR's own: quota seats before the economically weaker section allocation, then the category split, then the total including it.

Every one of those totals matches the intake the university publishes on its own degree page, programme for programme, which is worth checking because the two documents are maintained by different bodies and often drift apart elsewhere in the system. The PwBD and UPS columns are horizontal, not additional: if seat is not available in a particular category to which the candidate belongs, then the same would be drawn from the general category.

There is one more line in the brochure that changes how a borderline candidate should think about the mop-up round. Seats left vacant after the final round automatically stand released to the Agricultural University concerned for filling up at their level and stop being ICAR seats altogether, at which point the university's own procedure takes over.

RPCAU sits at rank 14 with an overall score of 58.25 in the 2025 agriculture and allied sectors table of the National Institutional Ranking Framework, the only category in which it is ranked.

Position aside, the five parameter scores pull in two directions. Teaching, learning and resources at 78.82 is the strongest of the five parameters and reflects faculty strength, student numbers and spending; research and professional practice at 31.76 is less than half of it and is what holds the overall score down. For an undergraduate that gap is mostly harmless, since the parameter that pays for classrooms and laboratories is the strong one. For a prospective doctoral student it is the number to interrogate, discipline by discipline, before committing three or four years.

A comparison the table invites but does not make: the institute that tops the same list, scoring 89.23, is IARI, which began on this campus and left it for Delhi after the earthquake. Descent counts for nothing in this framework, and the gap between the two scores is where the last century of divergent funding shows up.

Teaching is distributed across eight constituent colleges of very different ages, most of them older than the central university that now runs them.

Within them, the university's own account puts postgraduate teaching in 27 subjects and Ph.D. programme in14 subjects, running from the crop sciences through soil science, entomology, nematology and agricultural statistics to apparel and textile science and resource management. The discipline tables on the degree page list more entries than that, which usually means a subject has been notified since the prose was last revised; the current session's admission notification is the document that settles which disciplines are actually taking students.

Research sits alongside teaching in named units rather than inside the colleges, and two of them are the reason a specialist would come here at all: the Sugarcane Research Institute at Pusa, and the Banana Research Centre at Goraul in Vaishali. Both address crops that dominate north Bihar's cropping pattern and are studied at very few other addresses in India.

The library holds a collection of over 70000 documents, national and international journals, and the laboratory list is unusually deep on the molecular side for an agricultural campus, with separate molecular biology laboratories, a genetic transformation laboratory, a biochemical genetics laboratory, plant tissue culture and bio-imaging facilities. The soil sciences carry their own bench space for microbiology, soil physics, micronutrients and soil test crop response, and the engineering college runs farm machinery, farm power, material testing, hydraulics and wells-and-pumps laboratories.

Beyond the buildings, the working estate is the teaching resource. Poly-houses, dairy and poultry farms, lakes, ponds and wetlands are spread through the 2063 acres, which is what lets a curriculum built around field practicals actually run on site rather than on a visit. Students get free medical facility through University Hospital, smart classrooms and an auditorium, and the university preserves fourteen of the old imperial-era bungalows on the estate.

Inside the buildings the filed answers are decent enough, ramps or lifts and accessible toilets each reaching more than 80% of the buildings, with wheelchair provision confirmed. What no return covers is the 2063 acres of estate the university tells students to cross by bicycle, so a candidate with a mobility need should establish which Pusa or Dholi block their own programme is taught in before accepting an allotment.

The hostels page on the university site carries no detail at all; it says information will be updated soon, so no bed count, block list or mess menu can be quoted from it. What the admission notice sets out, however, is more useful to a family packing for reporting day than any of that would be.

Accommodation is allotted after successful admission and is not chosen during counselling. Each student is provided with a cot; however, items such as a mattress, bedsheet, pillow and bucket, etc. must be arranged by the student. The mess fee, which is approximately Rs 6,600, must be deposited at the time of admission, on top of the course fee. Boys' and girls' hostels are separate and carry high speed Wi-Fi.

Two campus rules are worth knowing before arrival because they are enforced and they are unusual. A blazer is mandatory for attending classes for UG students, sold at stalls during reporting. And motorbikes are strictly prohibited for students, with a bicycle advised instead, because the estate is too spread out to cross on foot. Parents accompanying a student can request limited university accommodation by writing to the guest house in advance, or stay in Samastipur or Muzaffarpur.

The teaching body is large, long-serving and overwhelmingly doctoral. The agriculture and allied sectors return names 157 regular teaching staff with their designation, qualification and joining date, nearly all of them holding a PhD, with M.Tech holders concentrated in the engineering college. The university's own site puts overall faculty strength at 250+, the wider figure covering staff outside the agriculture submission.

The joining dates in that list describe a specific hiring history. A large block joined between 2006 and 2009, a second block in 2018 and 2019, and the longest-serving professors were already teaching here when this was still Rajendra Agricultural University. A student sitting in a classroom at Pusa is quite likely being taught by someone who has worked on the same campus through both of its identities.

Research supervision is where that faculty is tested, and the doctoral numbers are modest but steady: 73 full-time PhD students on the rolls, with 30 doctorates awarded in 2024-25, 26 in 2023-24 and 20 in 2022-23. External funding has grown quickly over the same window, from 66 sponsored projects in 2022-23 to 156 in 2024-25, drawn from 63 funding agencies, alongside 407 consultancy projects in the latest year. That growth is the counterweight to the low research score in the ranking table, and it is recent enough that it has not yet worked its way into a published rank.

No list of named graduates is published by the university, and its success stories pages describe programmes and field interventions rather than individuals. Rather than borrow a list of celebrities from a listing site and attach them to Pusa on a thin connection, this page carries none. The alumni evidence that does exist is aggregate and sits in the placements table above, where the higher-studies column is the more telling number for a research-oriented campus.

The main campus is at Pusa in Samastipur district, and the university points arriving families to Samastipur (20 km) or Muzaffarpur (30 km), both of which are well connected to RPCAU, Pusa. For the Dholi campus, the nearest railway station is Dholi itself, and the airports at Patna (110 km) and Darbhanga (53 km) are the practical arrival points for a student travelling from outside Bihar.

Sundays and one Saturday a month are holidays, and during the admission window the university runs dedicated helpline numbers printed on the notice itself rather than routing candidates through the general line.

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