The Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai was established in 1936 by the Sir Dorabji Tata Trust as the Sir Dorabji Tata Graduate School of Social Work — Asia's oldest institute for professional social work education — with the original aim of training human-service professionals to address unemployment and poverty during the Great Depression era. It was renamed Tata Institute of Social Sciences in 1944, and on 29 April 1964 the Government of India declared it a 'Deemed to be University' under Section 3 of the UGC Act, 1956. Its present campus at Deonar, Mumbai, was inaugurated on 6 October 1954 by then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. TISS's institutional vision centres on developing and applying knowledge toward a people-centred, ecologically sustainable and just society, and it has historically played a role in shaping Indian social policy — including labour welfare legislation in the 1940s — and in field-action responses to major events such as the Partition of India, the Bhopal gas disaster, and the Uttarakhand floods. TISS operates as a multi-campus university, with its main Mumbai (Deonar) campus alongside campuses at Tuljapur (rural campus, Maharashtra), Guwahati, and Hyderabad. The Mumbai campus alone spans roughly 21 acres (with the wider TISS system's combined campus area cited around 321 acres across all locations), and its Sir Dorabji Tata Memorial Library (established 1936, named in 2002) is among the leading social-science libraries in India, holding roughly 123,000 books and over 10,000 journal titles, alongside the M.K. Tata Centre for the Visually Challenged. TISS has traditionally offered postgraduate and doctoral programmes across Social Work, Habitat Studies, Management and Labour Studies, Disaster Studies, Development Studies, Education, Gender Studies, Health Studies, Law, Media and Cultural Studies, Public Policy, and Rural Development, and in recent years has also introduced select undergraduate programmes (e.g., B.Sc in Analytics and Sustainability Studies, admitted via CUET-UG at the Mumbai campus). Since 2023, TISS's governance has shifted: institutions receiving over 50% government funding were brought under direct Union Government/Ministry of Education oversight, ending the long-standing Tata Trusts management arrangement, and IIM Mumbai director Prof. Badri Narayan Tiwari served as interim Vice-Chancellor from late 2023 to August 2025 during this transition. This period saw TISS discontinue its long-running TISSNET (PG) and TISS-BAT (UG) entrance examinations in favour of CUET-PG/CUET-UG and CAT-based admissions from the 2024-25/2025-26 cycles, alongside a reported broader academic restructuring with a more management-oriented emphasis — a shift some commentary (e.g., The Ken, November 2025) has characterised as remaking a social-science-focused institute along more IIM-like lines, a characterisation TISS's own leadership frames instead as modernisation and academic expansion ahead of its 90th-anniversary celebrations in 2026. Separately, a funding dispute over salaries for roughly 115 contractual teaching and non-teaching staff employed under Tata Education Trust (TET)-funded programmes led to mass termination notices in June 2024, which were withdrawn after TET committed emergency funds; TET subsequently extended funding for these posts through March 2026, and as of December 2025 TISS was reported to be requesting a further five-year funding extension from Tata Trusts for these positions.