Correspondence courses in India should be administered by the universities only and in the first instance, by one University, viz., the University of Delhi as a pilot project.

•  Thus was born in 1962 the University of Delhi’s School of Correspondence Courses and Continuing Education. Subsequently the Education Commissi on (1964-66), under the chairmanship of Dr. D.S. Kothari, also perceived correspondence education as an answer to the increasing pressure of numbers as well as the growing financial pressures on the universities.
•  The next decade i.e. the 1970s saw the growth and spread of the Correspondence Education system in India, by more conventional universities opening Correspondence Course Institutes (subsequently renamed as Directorates of Distance Education/ Centres of Distance Education ).
•  The opportunity of access, affordability and convenience offered by the DE system contributed to its increasing popularity and growth. But again the DE system was plagued by the rigidities of the conventional system. The only flexibility was with regard to the larger number of seats. Education was still out of the reach of the marginalized and the disadvantaged. .It was realized that unless we open educational opportunities to the deprived, unless we remove the structural rigidities in our educational system and unless we integrate the educational system with developments in communication technology, we cannot and will not make headway in realizing the uphill task of educating majority of the people and of catering to the diverse types of education that a modern society demands
•  Against this background the government introduced the Open University system in the 1980s, with the objective to further democratize opportunities for higher education to large segment of the Indian population, particularly those for whom access was difficult or impossible such as those living in remote and rural areas, working people, women and other adults who wish to acquire