The northern part of West Bengal is endowed with diverse natural resources like forest, economic plant resources, agro-ecosystem, etc, together with an extremely responsive rural communities. It comprises old alluvial, terai and hill zones distributed in six northern districts of West Bengal viz., Cooch Behar, Jalpaiguri, Darjeeling, Malda, Dakshin Dinajpur and Uttar Dinajpur. The economy of this part of West Bengal is predominantly agrarian in nature and agriculture is characterised by low productivity and subsistence farming with limited number of crops due to inherent soil-climatic and agro-ecological conditions. Thus generations of improved technologies befitting to 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 of Cooch-Behar district in 1979. Since then the Indian Council of Agricultural Research accredited the campus and started extending development support. A notable change in agricultural and horticultural crop production, productivity and cropping pattern in North Bengal became perspective from late eighties onwards.
Despite inadequate manpower and infrastructural facilities, the research, the extension and teaching activities at North Bengal campus were noteworthy. During late nineties post graduate programme was also started. With the introduction of National Agricultural Research Project (NARP), Pundibari became the head-quarter of the Terai-agro climatic zone of West Bengal. Since then region specific problems had been taken care of by the campus and a lot of technologies have been generated through various research programme.
However, all this were still meagre, with respect to the desire and need of the farmers. Later, the State Government strengthened this satellite campus of Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya furthar, and ultimately decided to upgrade this campus to a full-fledged State Agricultural University in July 2000 covering the entire North Bengal.
The "Uttar Banga Krishi Viswavidyalaya" was established by West Bengal Act XX of 2000 and started functioning from 1st February, 2001.