The university has around 300 affiliated colleges spread over five districts in central Kerala.

Private buses to Ernakulam starting from the Nagampadom bus stand at the northern end of the railway platform at Kottayam stop at the university.

Centre for Advanced Research in Library and Information Sciences (CARLIS) was established in 2010 for research on technologies that can transfer existing knowledge from traditional media to future proof digital media for the networked society.

CARLIS started Offering PhD programmes in 2010 and the areas of research are content management, digital archiving, multimedia resources, information administration, information economics, information infrastructures, IPR issues, knowledge warehousing, language technologies, Open Access protocols, resource sharing networks etc.

The research by the team associated to CARLIS has developed the Digital Library package with search mechanisms for Indian scripts used in Gandhi University on line Theses Library the first official Open Access Archive of PhD theses from Indian universities.