Purbanchal University and Pokhara University are both called PU. Which is which?

Both. Two different universities abbreviate themselves PU in their own official documents, both award BE degrees, and they have no college in common. Purbanchal is headquartered at Gothgaun in Morang and runs one central entrance for its whole engineering faculty. Pokhara is headquartered in Kaski and runs no university-wide BE entrance at all, leaving it to each college.

This is a question about names before it is a question about universities, and getting it wrong costs applicants real time. Purbanchal University and Pokhara University both write themselves PU on their own letterheads and in their own notices. Both award four-year BE degrees. Both do it largely through private affiliated colleges rather than their own campuses. They are separate institutions with separate acts, separate entrances, separate scholarship schemes and no shared college, and a search result or a college brochure that says "PU affiliated" has not told you which one it means.

The two universities, side by side

	Purbanchal University	Pokhara University
Where it is	Gothgaun, Morang, in Koshi Province in the east	Kaski, in Gandaki Province in the west
Engineering colleges on the regulator's register	20, across 7 districts	16, across 11 districts
Who runs the BE entrance	The Faculty of Engineering, once, for every college	Each college, on its own date, with its own notice
Is there a published entrance syllabus	Yes, with a marks distribution and a model question	No BE syllabus or model question was published on its school's own pages
Are seats published	Yes, per programme per college, though the list is dated 2024	Only for its own School of Engineering
Is a fee published	No fee was found on any university or faculty page	Yes, a whole four-year total per programme at its own school
Scholarship	10% of every section, 5% merit and 5% reserved, no separate form for engineering	10% of affiliated seats and 20% of constituent seats, through a separate university examination

Scroll the table sideways for Pokhara University.

The practical difference for an applicant is the entrance. At Purbanchal you sit one paper, on one Saturday, at a centre the faculty assigns you, and the college you named on the form is the college your result is filed against. At Pokhara there is no university-wide BE entrance at all: each college invites applications, sets its own examination date and may interview before selecting, so applying to two Pokhara colleges means two separate examinations. Purbanchal is the more centralised of the two by a wide margin, and in that respect it resembles the Tribhuvan University IOE route more than it resembles Pokhara.

Where it differs from IOE, which is the route most applicants know

Purbanchal is centralised in the same shape as IOE and not to the same depth. Both run one examination for a whole system. From there they diverge. IOE publishes a central rank across every campus and college, admits through a central portal on three scheduled merit lists with a complaint hour on each, and lets you state a priority order across colleges. Purbanchal ties your application to the college you chose at form-filling time, and its published route to a different college is a permission from that college rather than a place in a list. IOE's paper is 100 questions worth 140 marks with ten per cent deducted for a wrong answer; Purbanchal's is 100 marks of objective questions with no published penalty either way.

Two more places these three get confused

A college can be under one PU and named after the other's region: Nepal Engineering College at Changunarayan is a Pokhara University college, not a Tribhuvan or Purbanchal one, and the largest directory site in Nepal heads its profile with the wrong university. Check the regulator's register rather than a listing.
Two colleges in Bhaktapur are called Khwopa: Khwopa Engineering College at Libali is Purbanchal. Khwopa College of Engineering is a Tribhuvan University community college. Different institutions, different universities, one town.

One thing that is true of Purbanchal right now

On 28 August 2026 the Purbanchal University Office of the Examination Management published a notice postponing every examination then running and every examination scheduled under its published routine, citing the natural disaster affecting students, guardians and the public, on the instruction of the Minister for Education and Sports and the university's Pro-Vice-Chancellor. The notice says the schedule for the postponed examinations will be published later. No such schedule had appeared on the university's notice page when it was read on 2 September 2026. That notice covers the university's semester and annual examinations rather than the BE entrance, which had already been held on 15 August. If you are affected, read the university's own notice page rather than any secondary account of it, including this one.

The two universities' locations and registers are from the Nepal Engineering Council's registers for each and from Purbanchal University's own About page. ⚠️ That page says the university was established in 1994 and its own Faculty of Engineering's About page says 1993; both were read on 2 September 2026 and neither is recorded here as the answer. The Pokhara column is the material already sourced in this library from that university's own pages. The postponement is from the Office of the Examination Management's notice of 2083-05-12, a scanned image read off the rendered page.