Sher-e-kashmir University Of Agricultural Science & Technology Of Kashmir, Srinagar

SKUAST Kashmir carries two national ranks that look like they belong to two different institutions. It sits 7th on the National Institutional Ranking Framework's 2025 agriculture table and 94th on the same framework's overall table, and almost the entire gap is one column: a perception score of 34.67 among agriculture peers against 1.60 in the all-India pool. What an applicant actually decides on sits lower down. One entrance test fills nearly every seat reserved for local candidates, the veterinary degree is billed by the year while every other degree is billed by the semester, and the category split of all 845 undergraduate places is published before applications open.

The full name is Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology of Kashmir, and the suffix on the short form SKUAST-K is doing real work, because the acronym without it belongs to two universities. The Kashmir university dates itself from the original Act, describing itself as having been established in 1982 with its main campus at Shalimar, Srinagar Kashmir (J&K) India-190025. The Jammu half broke away much later: SKUAST-Jammu's own site records that it came into existence on September 20, 1999 following the amendment in Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology Act, 1982, through the State Legislature. The name both of them carry honours Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, who was called Sher-e-Kashmir.

That split matters at the point of application, because the two universities now run separate entrance tests, separate fee schedules and separate rankings, and a third Srinagar institution with a near-identical name, the Sher-e-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, is a medical body with no connection to either. Search the acronym on its own and the results interleave all three institutions, so the first thing to do with any SKUAST number is establish whether it belongs to Srinagar, to Jammu, or to a medical institute that is not a SKUAST at all.

Nothing about SKUAST-K sits on one plot. Its lecture halls, orchards, forest farm and fish ponds are scattered down the valley from Sopore to Ganderbal, and it describes itself as a multi-campus, multi-disciplinary and research-intensive university with 6 academic campuses, 10 KVKs and 11 Research Stations, established in 1982, the KVKs being the Krishi Vigyan Kendras, or farm science centres, through which its extension work reaches growers directly.

The research output the university leads with is a rice variety rather than a ranking. Its own account records Shalimar Rice-4 reaching productivity levels of 110 q/ha against a national average of 25 q/ha, alongside the first Kashmir basmati line and the revival of local landraces such as Mushkbudgi. On the innovation side the university reports 24 patents in the last 4 years and 26 start-ups, and its 2025 admission notice raises that to 67 startups and 52 patents, with 15 BIRAC-BIG grants.

Two things decide what you pay here, and neither is the programme name. The first is the billing unit: the veterinary degree is priced per year and every other degree is priced per semester, so a semester figure and an annual figure sitting side by side on a listing page are not comparable. The second is the category you enter under, because a Self-Finance seat costs several times an Open Merit one for exactly the same teaching.

One caveat before the tables. Every fee below is read off the admission brochure for the 2024 UG and PG cycle, which is still the brochure the university links from its own home page, and SKUAST-K notifies fee revisions separately rather than by reissuing it. Treat these as the last schedule the university published in full, and confirm the current one at counselling.

Twelve undergraduate degrees run for candidates domiciled in Jammu and Kashmir or Ladakh: B.V.Sc & A.H, B.Sc (Hons) in Agriculture, Horticulture, Forestry and Sericulture, the Bachelor of Fisheries Science, B.Tech in Agricultural Engineering, Food Technology and Biotechnology, and B.Sc (Hons) in Biochemistry, Microbiology, and Economics and Data Science. The 2025 admission notice adds a B Tech Artificial Intelligence run with IIT Mandi and a B Tech Dairy Technology to that list.

Master's pricing is flatter and does not vary by discipline. Every master's programme charges 26,700 at admission and the first semester without hostel, 44,000 with hostel, then 14,900 a semester without hostel and 24,200 with it on the Open Merit rate, and 66,700 and 84,000 at admission, then 54,900 and 64,200 a semester on Self-Finance. A postgraduate on an Open Merit seat therefore pays less per semester than an undergraduate on one.

Candidates from outside the union territories pay a different schedule entirely, and the multiple is steep. Under the NRI-sponsored and other states category the veterinary degree costs Rs 3,52,000 in the first year and Rs 3,36,100 in each year after it, while every other degree costs Rs 1,53,900 and then Rs 1,36,100, with hostel charged separately at 47,200.00 a year for a single seater and 41,200.00 for a double seater, mess excluded. A master's seat in the same category runs at 1,61,600 a year without hostel and 1,88,200 with it, falling to 1,53,800 and 1,72,400 from the second year.

The University Entrance Test, written UET, is the gate for almost everything, and the exception is worth memorising before you prepare. For domiciled candidates the brochure sets the mode of admission as the University Entrance Test for all UG programmes except B Tech Agricultural Engineering, which is admitted on the JEE Mains score. Master's admission for domiciled candidates runs on the same test but a separate paper on a separate day, sat only at Shalimar: the 2024 brochure put the undergraduate paper on 19-5-2024 at Srinagar / Jammu Centers and the master's paper on 26-5-2024 at SKUAST Shalimar, which matters if you are travelling from Jammu or Ladakh for the postgraduate one.

Eligibility is a single bar with a subject list behind it. A candidate must hold 10+2 or Higher Secondary Part-II with English, Physics, Chemistry and Biology or Mathematics, at an aggregate not below 50% for Open Merit and 40% for reserved category candidates, and be between 17 years and 28 years of age, the age band widening to minimum 21 years and maximum 37 years in case of Nominees of GoJK. The subject rule then splits the twelve degrees three ways, and the split is not the one a candidate usually assumes. Biology is the required fourth subject for veterinary science, fisheries, agriculture, horticulture, forestry, sericulture and food technology, and for the biochemistry and microbiology degrees. Agricultural engineering is the single programme that insists on English, Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics; biotechnology accepts Biology or Mathematics either way; and economics and data science is the one door open to a commerce or arts stream, provided the candidate carried Mathematics, statistics or Economics as one of the subjects. Master's entry needs a bachelor's degree of 10+2+4 duration or above in the related field with an OGPA of not less than 6.50 on a 10.00 scale, or 65% aggregate.

Two national quotas are added on top of the domicile matrix rather than carved out of it, which is why they do not appear in the seat table further down. The brochure records that 15% of seats over and above the intake capacity for undergraduate programmes excluding B.V.Sc & A.H shall be filled by ICAR, and 15% over and above the B.V.Sc & A.H intake shall be filled by VCI on the merit obtained in NEET. For a veterinary applicant from outside Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh that is one of only two ways in, and it is decided on a NEET rank with the UET playing no part at all; the other is the NRI-sponsored and other states category described below.

Candidates in the NRI-sponsored and other states category skip the test altogether. Their undergraduate selection is made on the basis of inter-se-merit at the 10+2 or Higher Secondary Part-II examination, and their master's selection on the inter-se-merit obtained at the bachelor's degree in the concerned subject.

The application fee is small and category-dependent: Rs 1500 for general and Rs 1000 for reserved categories for the UG programmes, Rs 1000 and Rs 750 for agricultural engineering, and INR 1800 for master's applicants in the NRI-sponsored and other states category. The window has opened in early April in recent cycles, with online submission running from 7th to 30th April 2025 for the 2025-26 session.

One procedural detail is unusually favourable to candidates and few applicants use it. The answer key is uploaded on the university website within 48 hours after the test and stays up for 03 days, and a written representation supported by documentary proof reaching the Controller of Examinations within 03 days is considered. There is also no negative marking, so leaving a question blank costs you the same as answering it wrongly.

SKUAST-K advertises no closing rank, and that follows from how it ranks people rather than from anything it is holding back. Every domiciled candidate sits the one test and comes out with a single position on a single list, after which merit obtained in the UET-2024 shall determine the choice of programme. A programme closes at whatever point in that one list its seats run out during counselling, so the line for B.Sc Sericulture in any given year is set by how many people ahead of it chose B.V.Sc, horticulture or agriculture first.

The brochure prints three rules that push that line about, and none of them is visible on a listing page. Vacancies do not fall back into the open pool: seats falling vacant under any category (other than the SC, ST and EWs) shall be filled strictly in order of merit obtained in UET-2024 under Self-Finance category, so an unfilled OBC or backward-area seat reappears as a paying seat rather than a cheaper one. At master's level the reserved seats are not even pinned to fixed disciplines, because the notes under the postgraduate seat matrix say the university shall follow a rotational policy in allotment of specified disciplines for reserved categories candidates on year to year basis, which means last year's reserved allocation in a discipline predicts nothing about this year's. And the process stops on the calendar rather than on the seat count: after the fixed time frame the admission process may invariably close even if some seats under any category are left unfilled; such seats shall be deemed as lapsed.

Counselling has moved online, and the deadline that binds a candidate is now a registration window rather than a rank published afterwards. The university's board carries an Extension of Registration for Online Counselling and Automatic Seat Allotment for admission to UG Programmes (2026-27), Submission and Modification of Preferences and Data Verification, and its own ticker dated the round: Online Registration for UG Counselling (2026 27) Registration open from 22.08.2026 to 25.08.2026, free of cost, with only registered candidates considered for seat allotment. Miss that window and your UET rank buys you nothing, which is the practical cutoff at SKUAST-K. Any number circulating as a fixed "SKUAST Kashmir cutoff" before allotment has run was inferred somewhere else.

At SKUAST-K the bachelor's degree mostly leads to another degree and the master's mostly leads to a job. The two tables below are lifted from one filing, on one set of definitions, so for once the two levels can be compared like for like.

Read the two tables together and the shape is clear. In the most recent year filed, 394 of 599 undergraduates went on to further study while 201 took a job, so a first degree here functions mostly as a qualification for a master's, an ICAR fellowship or a competitive examination. At postgraduate level the balance flips, with 246 of 422 placed. The postgraduate median is also the higher of the two, at Rs 6,84,000 against Rs 6,48,000, which is the return on the extra two years in the only figures the university has filed.

One caution on the middle row. The 108 placed in 2022-23 sits against 206 the year before and 201 the year after, while the graduating cohorts behind those three years ran 470, 406 and 599. The dip is far bigger than the cohort shrank, so whatever happened in that placement season was specific to it, and three points on a curve this jagged are not a trend you can extend. No highest-package figure and no recruiter count appear anywhere in the filing, and neither is quoted here for that reason.

SKUAST-K prints its entire domicile intake, every programme against every category, in the brochure it publishes before applications open, and almost no listing page carries the grid intact. That means the exact size of the pool you would be competing in is knowable before you sit the test, which is worth more than any inferred cutoff.

The Self-Finance column is the one to sit with. Of 845 domicile undergraduate places, 260 are Self-Finance, which is close to a third of the intake paying the higher schedule set out above and drawn from the same merit list. The reservation percentages behind the columns are set by the union territory rather than by the university: Open Merit 50%, Scheduled Caste 8%, Scheduled Tribe 20%, Other Backward Classes 8%, residents of areas adjoining the Line of Actual Control or International Border 4%, residents of backward areas 10% and Economically Weaker Sections 10%, with horizontal reservation of 4% for persons with disabilities, 3% for children of defence personnel, 1% for children of para-military and UT police personnel and 2% for outstanding sportspersons. The Scheduled Tribe share is the one that surprises applicants from other states, and it now includes the Pahari Ethnic Group added by the Constitution (Jammu and Kashmir) Scheduled Tribes Order (Amendment) Act, 2024.

Outside the domicile matrix the counts are much smaller. Undergraduate seats for NRI-sponsored and other state candidates total 130 and 130, giving 260, with 20 and 20 for B.V.Sc & A.H and 10 and 10 for each of the other eleven degrees, and master's seats in the same categories total 50 NRI-sponsored and 100 for other states and union territories. Domicile master's seats are published faculty by faculty instead, and the ordering is not the one the undergraduate matrix would lead you to expect: 407 at the Faculty of Horticulture, 308 at the Faculty of Agriculture, 203 at the Faculty of Veterinary Sciences and Animal Husbandry, 89 at the Faculty of Fisheries, 80 each at the College of Agricultural Engineering and Technology and the Faculty of Forestry, and 38 at the College of Temperate Sericulture. Horticulture and agriculture take identical undergraduate intakes of 175 each, yet horticulture runs the larger master's operation by a third, which is a fair guide to where the research money and the supervision capacity have gone at Shalimar.

The sanctioned intake the university files with the government has been climbing fast. Its national ranking return records undergraduate approved intake of 632 in 2020-21, 783 in 2021-22, 875 in 2022-23 and 1344 in 2023-24, with postgraduate intake rising from 425 to 841 over the last two of those years. The undergraduate figure more than doubled in three years, which is the context for every fee, hostel and placement number on this page.

SKUAST-K appears in four NIRF 2025 tables, and the spread between them says more than any single row does. Same university, same submission, same year, judged against four different peer groups.

Perception is where the four rows part company, and it is scored by asking a peer group what it thinks. Among agriculture institutions the university scores 34.67; against every kind of Indian institution pooled together it scores 1.60, and against universities 1.12. A university that works on apple orchards, temperate sericulture and coldwater fish is well known to the people who work on those things and largely unknown to everyone else, and NIRF's overall table measures the second thing as much as the first.

Research moves for the same reason. The agriculture table scores research and professional practice at 54.21 and the overall table at 26.15, because publication volume in agricultural science is being compared with engineering and medicine in one case and with its own field in the other. Graduation outcomes hold up in every table, from 82.08 in agriculture to 73.30 in the overall list. For a student choosing an agriculture degree, the agriculture row is the one that describes the education being bought; the overall row mainly describes how far the name has travelled.

Teaching runs through seven faculties and colleges spread over the 6 academic campuses the university counts, because the Faculty of Horticulture and the College of Agricultural Engineering and Technology both sit at the Shalimar headquarters while the other five hold sites of their own. The address behind a degree is therefore a separate decision from the degree.

Two of those units are unusual nationally. The Faculty of Fisheries, established in August, 2005, is the country's first faculty with the domain of coldwater and hill fisheries, and it reserves two seats each in UG and PG for Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, Uttaranchal and Himachal Pradesh so the other hill states can train people in the same conditions. The veterinary faculty at Shuhama is the birth place of the first clone of the Pashmina goat, Noori, and holds Star Status College recognition under the Department of Biotechnology's Star College programme.

The postgraduate structure was rebuilt under the National Education Policy and now carries an obligation students should price in. Master's programmes run in Sandwich Mode, requiring a student to spend at least one semester on research or course work at an agricultural institution elsewhere in the country, with travel, boarding, lodging and other contingencies at the host institution met by the student. That is a real cost sitting outside the fee tables above.

The teaching estate is measured in hectares rather than blocks, because most of it is working land. The Faculty of Agriculture at Wadura is spread over an area of 92 hectares with an administrative block, three academic blocks with nine smart classrooms, a library of more than 25000 books, a bio-fertiliser research laboratory with a 1000 litre capacity fermenter, a multi-crop seed processing plant and instructional farms and orchards. The veterinary campus at Shuhama runs to 120 hectares of land with 83 divisional laboratories, 10 IT enabled smart classrooms, a referral veterinary clinical complex and two big animal farms, and the Faculty of Forestry at Benhama sits on 50 hectares with a medicinal and aromatic garden, an agroforestry farm and a lavender and rosemary park.

Laboratory quality is documented in most detail at Shalimar. The Faculty of Horticulture reports 54 world class modular labs including an NABL accredited residue analysis and quality control lab, two BSL-2 labs, 8 independent centres of excellence, 8 instructional farms, 40 protected structures and 18 IT enabled smart classrooms. The fisheries faculty keeps its own instructional farms rather than borrowing them, with fourteen fish ponds and two hatcheries at Shuhama for carps and schizothoracids, and sixteen raceways, 5 ponds, a poly house, an ornamental unit and a feed mill at Rangil for trout.

A disabled applicant gets three answers out of the ranking filing, and two of them are bands rather than counts.

Spread whatever falls outside those bands across six sites of very different vintage, from the Wadura college established in the year 1960 to the Shalimar engineering block upgraded to College of Agricultural Engineering & Technology with 06 divisions in 2020, and a university-wide percentage stops meaning much. The question to put is which buildings at Shuhama, Rangil or Benhama fall outside it, and the faculty office is the only place that can answer it.

Two further answers in the same filing read differently on a farm estate than they would on a city block. Against its carbon footprint the university reports solar panels, energy-efficient buildings, offsetting and sustainable procurement; against waste it reports a ban on single-use plastic items and composting; and for water it reports five harvesting systems at once, rooftop, surface runoff, percolation pit, recharge wells and storage tank, which on land that grows its own teaching material is working irrigation rather than a display. On curriculum structure the same return answers yes twice and no once: courses on the Indian Knowledge System yes, multiple entry and exit yes, teaching in Indian languages no, which for a university whose growers speak Kashmiri and Urdu is the answer worth noticing.

Accommodation is priced as an add-on and allotted on availability, which is the opposite of the fully residential model and needs planning for. The brochure states plainly that hostel is to be allotted subject to availability and the hostel fee does not include the mess charges, and elsewhere that limited hostel facilities are available for housing students. A place is not guaranteed by admission.

What it costs is visible as the difference between two columns of the fee table. For a domiciled Open Merit undergraduate the first payment rises from Rs 35,900 without hostel to Rs 53,700 with it, and for a veterinary student the first year rises from Rs 52,000 to Rs 76,600. Candidates in the NRI-sponsored and other states category are quoted standalone hostel charges instead, and that block is the only place in the brochure where a room type carries its own price: 47,200.00 a year for a single seater and 41,200.00 for a double seater, mess excluded in both cases. Domicile candidates get no such breakdown, only the one bundled with-hostel column.

Room stock varies sharply by campus, and it is worth establishing before you accept a seat rather than after. Wadura reports eight hostels, 3 for boys and 5 for girls alongside a health centre with 24 x 7 medical service support and a bank with an ATM; Shuhama has six well established hostels; Benhama has three hostels; Mirgund has a boy's and girls' hostel; and Rangil has one Girls Hostel and one Boys Hostel. Horticulture at Shalimar puts no number on it at all, describing only a cluster of separate hostels for boys & girls and Guest houses. A fisheries applicant at Rangil is therefore competing for a fraction of the rooms a veterinary applicant at Shuhama is, on the same admission and the same fee schedule.

For NIRF 2025 the university returned 570 faculty members. Behind them sat 3085 students in the four-year undergraduate programmes and 1258 in the two-year postgraduate ones, plus 535 full-time doctoral scholars, with 141 doctorates completed in 2023-24 against 65 the year before. The doctoral output more than doubled in one year, which is the kind of jump that tells you supervision capacity was added recently. Note that the home page's headline 12,093 Students is counting a far wider population than those degree cohorts, so the two figures are not in conflict and neither is a class size.

Two lines in that filing say more about what a supervisor here actually does than any staff ratio would. Sponsored research ran to 213 projects from 71 funding agencies in 2023-24, worth what the return spells out as One hundred sixty nine crore seventy six lakhs forty three thousands eight hundred sixty seven rupees, against 189 projects worth forty one crore twenty lakh forty thousand two years earlier, a fourfold jump in money. Consultancy is bigger again by project count: 734 consultancy projects for 72 client organizations in the same year, worth Thirty Six crore eleven lakhs thirty three thousands six hundred thirty two rupees, where two years earlier it was 560 projects for 16 clients. Seventy-two paying clients in one year, on an estate that grows apples, rears sheep and farms trout, means the faculty is being hired to solve problems for growers, departments and firms, which is exactly the setting an applied master's benefits from.

The gender balance of the student body is worth noting because it runs against the national pattern for professional courses. Women outnumber men in both cohorts, at 1635 to 1450 in the undergraduate programmes and 679 to 579 in the postgraduate ones.

No individual alumnus is named in the admission brochure or on the admission notices a candidate actually reads, and this page will not borrow names from a listing site to fill the gap. SKUAST-K does run a separate alumni portal off its home page, which is the place to look for individuals. What the university publishes in its own admission material is where its graduates end up in aggregate, and one faculty puts a figure on it.

The Faculty of Forestry claims more than 80% of its alumni working in various sectors including the Agriculture Research Services, the Indian Forest Service, the Jammu and Kashmir Administrative Services and banking services besides the state forest department. The Faculty of Agriculture at Wadura reports having produced around 6000 graduates and postgraduates serving at state, national and international levels, and notes that a good number of its students qualify the civil services examinations. Those are the university's own summaries of its alumni body, not a verified roll.

SKUAST-K runs its admissions off its own notice board rather than through press coverage, and three postings there currently change what a 2026-27 applicant should do. The first is the Extension of Registration for Online Counselling and Automatic Seat Allotment for admission to UG Programmes (2026-27), Submission and Modification of Preferences and Data Verification, which sets the operative deadline. The second is a Revision of Seat Matrix for admission to BVSc and AH Degree Programme for Academic Session 2026-27 under NRI-Sponsored, Other State and UTs categories: if you want the veterinary degree from outside the union territories, that notice supersedes the counts printed in the brochure for exactly your two categories. The third opens Admission for UG Degree programmes under ICAR Category for the Academic Session 2026-27, which is the national quota described in the admissions section above, running as a separate process on its own timetable.

The same board is also where a new programme first turns into something real. It carries Document Verification-cum-Counseling of candidates provisionally allotted seats for admission to B.Tech. (AI in Agriculture) Degree Programme for the Academic Session 2026-27, so the artificial-intelligence degree the 2025 notice announced as a joint venture with IIT Mandi is now allotting seats rather than being advertised. Around that sit recruitment notifications, datesheets and events, including a national conference on applications of plant physiology for crop improvement and post-harvest management in horticulture. Answer keys, allotment results and admission dates all land here, which is why a candidate should read this board and not a listing page's calendar.

The comparison an applicant most often needs to make is with the other SKUAST, and the two are not close on the table that matters. On the NIRF 2025 agriculture list, SKUAST-K takes 7th place with a score of 65.81 while SKUAST-Jammu takes 23rd with 54.28.

Within Srinagar the comparison runs the other way, and it is a comparison of purpose rather than quality. The University of Kashmir sits 34th on the NIRF 2025 university table with a score of 57.13 against SKUAST-K's 75th and 49.70, because a general university teaching the sciences, humanities, law and commerce is measured comfortably in that pool and a farm university is not. A candidate deciding between the two is deciding whether to study agriculture at all, not which of them is better run.

The main campus is at Shalimar in Srinagar, close to the Mughal garden of the same name, with the other faculties spread across Sopore, Ganderbal and Mirgund.

Check the distance to the faculty you are actually applying to, not to the headquarters, because the sites sit anything from a short bus ride to a run up the Leh road out of Srinagar. The College of Agricultural Engineering and Technology at Shalimar is about 27 km from Srinagar airport, 14 km from Lal Chowk and 24 km from Srinagar railway station; the Faculty of Fisheries at Rangil is 19 km from the city centre and 16 km from the Shalimar headquarters; and the Faculty of Forestry at Benhama is about 40 km from Srinagar on the Srinagar to Leh road.

At a glance

Quick facts