CDS is located in a residential area in the northwest part of the City of Thiruvananthapuram, called Prasanthnagar. It is easily accessible by road, rail and air. The 10-acre (40,000 m2) campus, designed and constructed by the renowned architect, Laurie Baker, epitomizes his style and philosophy of adaptive building methods. The CDS Library is one of the biggest in South India with over 1,70,000 titles in Economics and allied disciplines and subscribing to about 88 print journals and 3326 e-journals and is fully automated using Libsys software. Residential accommodation on the campus consists of quarters for faculty and staff, hostels for students, a guesthouse and a cafeteria.