The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) announced on Monday that the four-rounds of online counselling for admission to undergraduate (UG) agriculture and allied courses for 2025-26 academic session will begin from Tuesday. The development comes over three months after the National Testing Agency (NTA) declared CUET-UG results on July 4.
ICAR opened its counselling portal on September 2 for registration and consent-based merit ranking (prepared using CUET-UG scores), which continued till September 8. However, officials said that the process of filling choices, fee payment, and uploading documents was delayed due to technical issues with the payment gateway.
“I know we could not keep the decided dates. We are hard pressed but please be assured that we all are on job seriously,” a senior ICAR official had told HT on Sunday.
According to the schedule, the first round of ICAR counselling will begin on October 14 at 2pm on icar.org.in and continue till October 17. Seat allotment results will be declared on October 21. The counselling will be held in four rounds, with the last round scheduled on November 6, followed by a mop-up round on November 14.
ICAR will fill 20% all India quota (AIQ) seats in 63 state agricultural universities and 100% seats in central agricultural universities, including RLBCAU Jhansi, RPCAU Samastipur, NDRI Karnal, and IARI campuses in Jharkhand and Assam. It also covers AIQ seats in four central universities—BHU (15%), AMU (5%), Visva-Bharati (15%), and Nagaland University (20%).
{{/usCountry}}ICAR will fill 20% all India quota (AIQ) seats in 63 state agricultural universities and 100% seats in central agricultural universities, including RLBCAU Jhansi, RPCAU Samastipur, NDRI Karnal, and IARI campuses in Jharkhand and Assam. It also covers AIQ seats in four central universities—BHU (15%), AMU (5%), Visva-Bharati (15%), and Nagaland University (20%).
{{/usCountry}}This year, ICAR has listed 6,002 AIQ seats, with the highest in B.Sc. (Hons.) Agriculture (3,121) and the lowest in Sericulture (22). Last year, ICAR opened counselling registration on August 7, just 10 days after CUET-UG 2024 results were declared on July 28, for 5,842 AIQ seats. The delay in counselling, earlier reported by HT, had left thousands of aspirants anxious as state-level admissions moved ahead.
On September 23, the ICAR directed agricultural universities to take “corrective steps” after students complained that 27 universities had barred those from the Agriculture-Biology-Chemistry (ABC) stream from admission to B.Sc. (Hons) Agriculture. Despite this, seven of the 50 universities offering the course still do not allow ABC students. “They will pass a resolution in this regard in their next academic counselling meetings and will add ABC as eligibility criterion from next year,” a senior ICAR official said.
While most science students study Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics (PCM) or Physics, Chemistry, Biology (PCB), lakhs across states like Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra pursue the ABC stream to further study agriculture and allied sciences.