UGC’s Pioneering Programmes for the Growth of University Libraries

For decades, the University Grants Commission has been the single most important force shaping how university libraries function across the country. Beyond releasing grants and framing regulations, the UGC has launched a series of focused programmes designed to fix real, on-the-ground problems: students who could not afford textbooks, libraries stranded without modern technology, and scattered information resources that nobody could access efficiently. Three of these programmes stand out for the way they reshaped academic libraries. Understanding them gives you a clear picture of how policy turns into practical support for students and researchers.

Why the UGC stepped into library development 🔗

When the UGC was set up in 1956, its mandate was to promote and coordinate higher education and to maintain standards in universities. Libraries were quickly identified as the backbone of teaching and research, so the Commission began treating them as a priority area rather than an afterthought. Over the following decades, a string of initiatives was rolled out, including the Book Bank scheme, Regional Library Centres, National Information Centres, collection development support, and infrastructure grants. According to a policy review of the UGC’s library efforts, these programmes together contributed to the rapid growth of university libraries and were backed by standards and evaluation criteria for collection building, library organisation, and service delivery.

What makes these programmes worth studying is that each one targeted a specific gap. The Book Bank scheme addressed affordability. Regional Library Centres addressed technological capacity. National Information Centres addressed subject-specific access to research material. Looked at together, they form a logical progression from helping individual students to building national-level information infrastructure.

The Book Bank scheme 🔗

The Book Bank scheme is the oldest and most student-facing of the three programmes. Launched in 1963-64, it was created to provide grants for purchasing multiple copies of expensive textbooks across various disciplines. The core idea was straightforward: a library would stock several copies of each prescribed textbook so that poor, needy, and deserving students could borrow them for home study against a nominal deposit, often for an entire semester or academic year.

How the scheme was funded 🔗

The financial structure of the scheme evolved over time. As documented in records of the Book Bank scheme’s history, the UGC initially provided grants of Rs. 15,000 to postgraduate colleges and Rs. 10,000 to degree colleges to set up book banks. Before 1975, the Commission covered 75% of the grant while colleges contributed a 25% matching share linked to student enrolment. After 1975, the formula shifted to roughly Rs. 60 per student, subject to a ceiling per college during a Plan period, with a portion of the library grant earmarked for book banks.

Why it mattered for equity 🔗

The scheme was particularly significant for students from economically and socially weaker backgrounds. Textbooks in professional courses such as engineering and medicine were often prohibitively costly, and the fear of repeated expense could push vulnerable students towards dropping out. The Book Bank directly reduced this pressure. Many institutions reserved book bank collections for SC, ST, and OBC students or for those qualifying under means-based scholarships. For example, the Central Library at IIT Bombay maintains a book bank of undergraduate textbooks specifically to help students from economically and socially weaker sections, lending sets of books for a full semester.

The decline of the scheme 🔗

The Book Bank was not without problems. A UGC Review Committee in 1981 noted gaps in how the scheme was implemented and observed that its impact varied widely across universities and colleges, which eventually led to its discontinuation as a central scheme. Even so, the concept proved durable. Many universities and colleges continue to run book bank facilities today using their own funds or state support, which shows how a well-designed idea can outlive the original programme. Institutions like the Sanatan Dharma College still operate book banks where committees sanction textbook sets to deserving and needy students each year.

Regional Library Centres 🔗

While the Book Bank focused on individual students, Regional Library Centres focused on the libraries themselves. These centres were established to build region-wise capacity, helping university libraries adopt advanced technologies and modern practices that individual institutions might struggle to develop on their own. The thinking was practical. Rather than expecting every university to independently master library automation, networking, and document delivery, the UGC supported designated hubs that could share expertise and resources across a zone.

The role of regional hubs 🔗

Regional centres acted as anchors for resource sharing and capacity building. A useful illustration is the way certain university libraries were recognised as regional resource centres for specific functions. The IGM Library at the University of Hyderabad was recognised as a Regional Library for the South Zone for mathematics and statistics from 1993, and was among the early resource centres identified for document delivery by the INFLIBNET Centre, alongside institutions such as BHU, JNU, Punjab University, the Indian Institute of Science, and TISS. This model meant that a research scholar in one part of the country could access material held in a well-resourced regional library without that material having to be duplicated everywhere.

The shift towards networking and IT 🔗

Over time, the goals of regional centres merged into the larger movement towards library networking and information technology. The most important institutional expression of this was the Information and Library Network (INFLIBNET), set up by the UGC as a programme in the late 1980s and later established as an Inter-University Centre. As described by the INFLIBNET Centre, it was created to modernise university libraries using state-of-the-art technologies, link libraries through a computer-communication network, build union catalogues, and promote resource sharing. INFLIBNET also developed SOUL (Software for University Libraries) to help libraries automate their in-house functions. In effect, the regional approach to capacity building scaled up into a national network.

National Information Centres 🔗

The third programme tackled a different challenge: subject-specific access to research literature. The UGC established a small set of National Information Centres housed in leading institutions, each tasked with building computer databases and providing advanced reference, documentation, and current awareness services in a defined field. The aim was to create specialised information hubs that researchers across the university system could draw on, rather than leaving each library to manage deep subject coverage alone.

The designated centres 🔗

According to detailed accounts of the UGC’s information centre programme, three centres were set up in specialised institutions. The National Centre for Science Information at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, served the physical, applied, and natural sciences. A centre at Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, and another at SNDT Women’s University, Bombay, supported the social sciences and humanities. Each centre concentrated on its domain, which allowed for far deeper indexing, documentation, and reference support than a general library could offer.

From subject centres to digital consortia 🔗

The logic of National Information Centres, that access to quality research material should be pooled and shared, fed directly into the UGC’s later digital initiatives. The clearest successor is the UGC-INFONET Digital Library Consortium, executed by INFLIBNET, which was launched to give universities online access to electronic journals and databases across disciplines. A study of the UGC-INFONET E-Journals Consortium describes it as one of the foremost programmes launched by the UGC for the free flow of scholarly information between Indian universities, fully funded by the UGC and monitored through INFLIBNET, with the centre conducting training and awareness programmes so that users could make full use of the e-resources.

This digital push expanded further to reach colleges, not just universities. The N-LIST project (National Library and Information Services Infrastructure for Scholarly Content) extended selected e-resources to thousands of government-aided colleges. These efforts have since been consolidated under e-ShodhSindhu, a consortium under the Ministry of Education that provides access to thousands of full-text journals and e-books to universities, colleges, and centrally funded technical institutions.

How the three programmes connect 🔗

It helps to see these programmes as parts of a single arc rather than isolated schemes. The Book Bank put physical textbooks into the hands of students who needed them most. Regional Library Centres strengthened the libraries themselves and pushed them towards automation and networking. National Information Centres organised specialised research material and laid the groundwork for shared, database-driven access. Each programme solved the problem of its era, and each one pointed towards the next stage of development.

The through-line is access. Whether the barrier was the cost of a textbook, the absence of technology, or the difficulty of locating subject literature, every programme was an attempt to remove a barrier between the user and the information they needed. The same principle now drives digital consortia that connect hundreds of institutions to global scholarly content. Knowing this history makes it easier to understand why current library services are structured the way they are, and why resource sharing remains the dominant model in academic librarianship.

What do you think? If you were redesigning the Book Bank scheme for today’s students, would you keep it focused on physical textbooks or shift it entirely towards subsidised digital access? And as more resources move to national digital consortia, what role should individual university libraries play beyond simply providing access?

References

1. https://www.ugc.gov.in/
2. http://s3-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/ijmer/pdf/volume12/volume12-issue8(5)/22.pdf
3. https://testbook.com/question-answer/to-provide-textbooks-to-poor-needy-and-deserving–676aaf06bf5b5ffe4dc6cbee
4. https://www.library.iitb.ac.in/services/book-bank/
5. https://www.sdcollegeambala.ac.in/book-bank-facility/
6. https://library.uohyd.ac.in/Aboutlib1.htm
7. https://www.inflibnet.ac.in/
8. https://www.lisquiz.com/2025/09/role-of-ugc-for-development-of-academic.html
9. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/libphilprac/112/