Santiniketan in the Indian state of West Bengal  has been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. 

What is UNESCO?
UNESCO is an acronym for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. It is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN) that works for world peace through global cooperation in the fields of education, culture and the sciences. 

India has been striving for long to get a UNESCO tag for this cultural site located in the Birbhum district of West Bengal. 

It was at Santiniketan where poet Rabindranath Tagore built Visva-Bharati over a century ago. 

Visva-Bharati is an university located in Shantiniketan in  West Bengal, India. It was founded by Rabindranath Tagore who called it Visva-Bharati, which means the communion of the world with India. 

Until independence it was a college. Soon after independence, the institution was given the status of a central university in 1951 by an act of the Parliament. 

When founded in 1921, it was named after Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore until Visva-Bharati Society was registered as an organization in May 1922.

Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European to win the Nobel literature prize, was proponent of open-air education and introduced that system at the university, which is still continuing.

Key Takeaways

• Visva-Bharati University was founded by  Rabindranath Tagore in 1921
• Visva-Bharati University is in West Bengal's Shantiniketan town.
• It will soon get the ‘heritage’ tag from UNESCO to become the world’s first living heritage university.
• UNESCO, an acronym for United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, is a specialized agency of the United Nations