On Wednesday, the UGC held a high level meeting with representatives from foreign publishing houses to discuss the possibility for publishing undergraduate English textbooks in Indian languages. The international publishers reportedly desired during the meeting that they would be willing to collaborate on this national mission.

Among the organisations represented at the discussion were Wiley India, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Cambridge University Press, Cengage India, and McGraw-Hill India. According to M. Jagadesh Kumar, chairman of the UGC, the discussion focused on translating textbooks for undergraduate programmes like BA, BCom, and BSc into various Indian languages. These books will also be translated into Punjabi, Telugu, Malayalam, Gujarati, Assamese, and Malayalam in addition to Hindi.
According to Kumar, the UGC would offer assistance to the publishers in finding textbooks, tools for translation, editors, etc. The fact that a model would be developed with the publishers to offer textbooks in digital format at reasonable prices was also highlighted. The initial importance will be on translating the current textbooks used in BA, BSc, and BCom programmes; later, postgraduate programmes will also get benefit from this work.