Punjabi University was founded at Patiala in 1962. By its own account it is the second university in the world to be named after a language, after Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Its mandate was the development of Punjabi as a medium of higher education, science and administration. It produced the Punjabi-English dictionary, the Punjabi encyclopaedia, terminological glossaries for the sciences, and the standard editions of a great deal of Punjabi literature.
Its Advanced Centre for Technical Development of Punjabi Language, Literature and Culture built the Gurmukhi fonts, the spell checkers, the optical character recognition and the machine transliteration between Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi that make Punjabi work on a computer. That transliteration tool is the reason Indian and Pakistani Punjabis can read each other at all online.
It has been in financial difficulty for years, with salaries delayed and departments cut.
The institution that keeps the language technically alive is chronically underfunded, which is a reasonable description of the position of Punjabi generally.
It was founded at Patiala in 1962 as one of the very few universities anywhere established for the development of a language, and that mandate is written into its constitution.
Its technical glossaries, its dictionaries, its encyclopaedia of Sikhism and its manuscript collection are the main institutional output of Punjabi scholarship in India.
Its finances have been in crisis repeatedly, with salaries delayed and departments cut. The institution charged with the language's development has spent years unable to pay its staff on time.