Vallabh Vidyanagar — universally shortened to V.V. Nagar — is a planned educational town that grew up immediately adjacent to Anand, separated from it by little more than a road. It was founded in 1949 by the independence-era politician and educationalist Bhaikaka (Bhailalbhai Patel), conceived as an affordable educational centre for students from rural Gujarat who could not afford the fees at established urban colleges. Today it is a compact campus town of some 200,000 people with a dozen colleges and several research institutes, anchored by Sardar Patel University, which was granted university status in 1955.
The town has the pleasant, slightly drowsy quality of places that run on academic rhythms rather than commercial ones. The streets around the university are good for a walk — lined with bookshops, cheap canteens, and the particular sociable energy of a student population. The Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA), which trains development professionals and is one of India's more distinctive postgraduate institutions, is also nearby. V.V. Nagar does not have obvious tourist attractions, but as a counterpoint to the dairy industry focus of Anand itself, it gives a sense of how this corner of Gujarat has built institutions — cooperative, academic, professional — out of deliberate collective effort rather than historical accident.