While education studies and urban studies have flourished as rich areas of research in South Asia, the interface between education and the urban has received little scholarly attention. It is quite difficult to trace any mention of the processes of acquisition, allocation or demarcation of land for the universities in the archival records on education. Similarly, specific discussions concerning university land seem to be largely absent from land department records in post-independence India. This is perhaps why the literature on the land question in India, in the fields of both agrarian and urban studies, rarely mentions the histories of land acquisition for universities. That the first education commission formed after India's independence was the University Education Commission of 1948 indicates that higher education was meant to have a significant role in the planned development of the new nation state. Many such institutions were built in the 1950s and 1960s, often at the fringes of big cities. The earliest were the higher technical institutes, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the first campus of which was opened in Kharagpur, a little far from the city of Calcutta (now Kolkata). A study of the architectural history of the institute argues that patterned on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, IIT Kharagpur was India's first ‘college town’ (Jain 2020). An Indo-American partnership enabled the establishment of agricultural universities in various states between 1952 and 1973. The ‘land grant university’ model in the United States served as the basis for envisioning these universities (Goldsmith 1990).