University of Hyderabad (UOH) was founded in 1974, it has a residential campus with more than 5,000 students and 400 faculty, from several disciplines. The governor of the state of Telangana is ex-officio the chief rector of the university, while the President of India is the visitor to the university.

The university was established along the lines of the Six-Point Formula of 1973. The first vice-chancellor of the university was Banaras Hindu University organic chemist Gurbaksh Singh, from 1974 to 1979. Shri B D Jatti was the first chancellor of the university.

In January 2015, the University of Hyderabad received the Visitor's Award for the Best Central University in India, awarded by the President of India.

The university is located in Gachibowli, on 2300-odd acres. The campus is rich in flora and fauna, home to over 734 flower plants, ten species of mammals, fifteen species of reptiles, and 220 species of birds.  The university library is a central facility to support teaching and research activities of the university. This present library building was inaugurated by Shankar Dayal Sharma, the then Vice President of India, on 21 October 1988 and named after late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

The library is connected to Campus Network. The library also created learning environment by establishing Online Public Access Catalog (WebOPAC), OPAC Searching Area, Internet browsing area, Laptop zone with Wi-Fi facility, specialised workstations & software for visually-challenged students and by facilitating electronic resources, search services/tools.Indira Gandhi Memorial library is the first automated university library in the country. 

University of Hyderabad started offering Post Graduate Diploma Programmes through distance mode since 1994. The target groups identified for these Programmes are (a) In service personnel looking forward to improve their skills and knowledge to enable to go up in the ladder in their own organisation or elsewhere and (b) Fresh graduate intending to improve their chances of employments on successful completion of these programmes.