The Regional Institute of English (RIE) was established in 1963 under a scheme of the Government of India to address the educational needs of the North Indian states. The functioning of the Institute is within the purview of the Chandigarh Administration. The Institute has worked and collaborated with state governments in the northern region, CBSE, Panjab University, NCERT, USIEF, British Council and RELO, American Centre, New Delhi for various research projects and teacher training programmes and the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad.
RIE has been running many courses each with a different set of target group i.e. catering to English language needs of people at diverse levels. It runs MA English, Postgraduate Certificate in the Teaching of English (PGCTE), a 120-hour course in Personal Development for students of UT Administration colleges.
In the session 2016-17, a new programme, CPD (Continuous Professional Development) was envisioned by Dr Vandana Lunyal for training teachers of Chandigarh with the objective of providing continuous professional support to them and addressing needs of English Language Teaching in school and colleges.
Since its inception, it has been catering to the educational needs of the region from primary to postgraduate level by organizing various need-based programmes. More than 10,000 teachers have benefitted from the various courses in the last ten years. In the past, RIE has conducted courses for International scholars also, AUSEP being the most recent one. Afghan University Student Exchange Programme (AUSEP), a four-week teacher education course in ELT for Afghan students was conducted in collaboration with American Centre for four consecutive years i.e. 2011-2014. In 2016, Institute was accredited by NAAC for both MA English and teacher education programmes. Presently the Institute is also covered under RUSA and has conducted many RUSA sponsored courses and workshops.
RIE has also been doing interdisciplinary teacher-training for Chandigarh Administration and other government agencies. In 2018-19, RIE organized 20 workshops on Disaster Management in collaboration with Chandigarh Administration and trained 1000 teachers of Chandigarh. In 2020-21 RIE organized a course on Video production for teachers of Chandigarh.