Abstract
OINCE the time when Voelcker wrote his report “The Improvement of Indian Agriculture1’ in 1893, it has been recognized that agricultural progress in India must be based firmly on research. Accordingly, when Mr. Henry Phipps, an American philanthropist, came forward in 1901 with a splendid donation of £30,000 to be devoted to some project of public utility, if possible in the direction of scientific research, Lord Curzon, who was then Viceroy, decided to use the greater part of this donation for the construction of an agricultural research laboratory at Pusa. Pusa is in a rather out of the-way part of the province of Bihar, and the choice of site was not perhaps the happiest. The earthquake of January 1934, which did great damage to the Institute, brought up the question of rebuilding or shifting it. The second alternative won the day, and the result is the new Institute of Agricultural Research at New Delhi. But the old name Pusa has become very familiar, and those coiners of local place-names, the taxi and tonga drivers of Delhi, have already christened tke new Institute the “Pusa College”, while many scientific workers in India often refer to it as the “New Pusa”.
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Burns, W. The Imperial Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi. Nature 139, 431–432 (1937). https://doi.org/10.1038/139431a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/139431a0