Punjab Agricultural University was founded at Ludhiana in 1962 on the American land grant model, combining teaching, research and extension in one institution with a mandate to serve the farmers of the state directly.
It bred and released the wheat and rice varieties that carried the Green Revolution, ran the kisan melas that took them to the villages, and trained the agricultural officers who staffed the districts.
Its extension apparatus, the farm advisory service and the monthly Punjabi journal Changi Kheti, reached households that had no other source of technical information. That is why adoption in Punjab was faster than anywhere else in India.
The same institution now publishes the data on falling water tables, on pesticide residue, on soil health and on the economics of crop diversification, and has been recommending a move away from paddy since the 1980s without being able to make it happen.
A university cannot change a procurement policy. That is the limit the institution has been up against for forty years.
The veterinary faculty was separated into its own university at Ludhiana in 2005, and the agricultural university at Faisalabad descends from the same 1906 college. The institution has been divided twice, once by a border and once by a statute.
Its wheat and rice varieties, its agronomy and its farm machinery work are what the Green Revolution in Punjab actually ran on.
Its budget in real terms has fallen for decades and its extension network has thinned. The institution that told Punjab what to grow is not in a position to tell it what to grow next.