Institutional Repositories: A Game-Changer for Academic Research in India

India has over 1.4 billion people, hundreds of universities, and a research output that grows every year. Yet for decades, a doctoral thesis completed in a university in Tamil Nadu might never be seen by a researcher in Assam – let alone by a student in another country. Institutional repositories have been quietly changing that reality. These digital platforms preserve and share the academic output of universities, research bodies, and educational institutions, making knowledge freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection. In India, a network of powerful national repositories has emerged that is reshaping how students, researchers, and educators access academic resources – and the scale of what has already been built is remarkable.

What are institutional repositories? 🔗

An institutional repository (IR) is a digital archive maintained by an academic or research institution to collect, preserve, and share its scholarly output. That output can take many forms – doctoral theses and dissertations, research papers, e-books, course materials, audio-video content, and more. The defining feature of an IR is open access: resources are freely available to users without subscription costs or paywalls. According to a Nature India analysis, these repositories store research articles, review papers, theses and dissertations, reports, preprints, and post-prints, and make them freely accessible and discoverable by the public. As of April 2020, India had at least 92 such repositories listed on the international Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) – a number that has continued to grow. Beyond individual institutions, India has also built several large national-level repositories that serve the entire country, and this is where some of the most significant work is happening.

Prominent institutional repositories in India 🔗

India’s national academic repositories span everything from school textbooks to doctoral research proposals, covering every level of formal education. Here is an overview of the most important platforms currently in operation.

NCERT e-books 🔗

The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) offers free digital textbooks for students from elementary to senior secondary levels. These cover a wide range of subjects and form the foundational academic resource for millions of students across India. All NCERT textbooks are freely downloadable, ensuring that even students without access to physical books can study from the official curriculum.

e-PG Pathshala 🔗

e-PG Pathshala is an initiative by the Ministry of Education (formerly MHRD) aimed specifically at postgraduate-level learners. The platform provides peer-reviewed content in the form of video lectures, notes, e-books, and quizzes, all freely available for download, across multiple academic disciplines. It is a particularly valuable resource for students enrolled in universities with limited access to specialist faculty or library resources.

Shodhganga 🔗

Shodhganga – the name draws from the Sanskrit words for “research” and “river” – is India’s central repository for doctoral theses and dissertations. Maintained by the INFLIBNET Centre, an autonomous body under the University Grants Commission (UGC), it aggregates electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) from universities across the country. According to the OECD, Shodhganga currently hosts over 5.31 lakh full-text theses from more than 770 contributing universities. Every thesis is assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), giving it a permanent, citable identity aligned with international standards for scholarly communication. The repository also supports multiple Indian languages – including Malayalam, Tamil, Gujarati, Sanskrit, Urdu, and Hindi – in addition to English. Notably, Shodhganga integrates plagiarism-detection software to protect academic integrity, and in 2017, the Shodhganga team received the NDLTD Leadership Award at Washington, D.C., in recognition of its contribution to global open-access research.

Shodhgangotri 🔗

While Shodhganga archives completed doctoral work, Shodhgangotri serves a complementary purpose. Also managed by INFLIBNET, Shodhgangotri is described as a repository of Indian research in progress – it stores the synopses and research proposals of ongoing Ph.D. programmes at Indian universities. This gives the research community a real-time view of what is being studied across India, helping scholars avoid duplicating work and building a culture of collaborative, connected inquiry.

eGyankosh 🔗

eGyankosh is a national digital repository developed by Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) to store, index, preserve, distribute, and share digital learning resources developed by open and distance learning institutions across India. The platform houses tens of thousands of self-instructional text materials along with video lectures covering a wide range of disciplines. IGNOU integrates eGyankosh with its broader technology-enabled learning ecosystem, which also includes MOOCs on SWAYAM and the Swayam Prabha DTH channels, ensuring that quality education remains both accessible and affordable for the university’s millions of learners.

NROER 🔗

The National Repository of Open Educational Resources (NROER) was developed by the Central Institute of Educational Technology (CIET), NCERT, in collaboration with the Ministry of Education. Launched on 13 August 2013, NROER aims to bring together all digital and digitisable resources for the Indian school system – across all classes, all subjects, and multiple languages. The repository carries a Creative Commons CC BY-SA licence, meaning content can be freely reused, revised, remixed, and redistributed, in line with UNESCO’s Paris Declaration on Open Educational Resources. Resources include videos, audio, interactive media, images, and documents – making it a genuinely multimedia platform for school and teacher education.

Project OSCAR 🔗

Project OSCAR (Open Source Courseware Animations Repository) is an initiative focused on providing free online access to open-source educational content for research and educational purposes. It brings together course materials across a variety of academic disciplines, supporting the broader open-access learning movement in India and helping researchers and students find resources that would otherwise require expensive subscriptions.

National Cultural Audiovisual Archives (NCAA) 🔗

The National Cultural Audiovisual Archives takes a distinct but equally important approach: it focuses on preserving India’s intangible cultural heritage in digital form. By archiving audiovisual material related to Indian culture, traditions, performing arts, and history, it ensures that this heritage is preserved for future generations and accessible to researchers studying the social, artistic, and historical dimensions of Indian civilisation.

Swayam Prabha 🔗

Swayam Prabha is a group of 40 DTH channels that broadcast high-quality educational programmes on a 24×7 basis using the GSAT-15 satellite. Every day, at least four hours of new content are broadcast and repeated five more times, allowing learners to watch at their convenience. Content is provided by IITs, UGC, CEC, and IGNOU, and the INFLIBNET Centre maintains the web portal. The channels cover subjects ranging from school education and undergraduate programmes to postgraduate and certificate-level courses, functioning as a broadcast institutional repository that reaches even learners in areas with limited internet connectivity.

How institutional repositories benefit researchers and students 🔗

The practical benefits of these platforms are significant and reach across every level of education in India.

Free access to academic resources 🔗

Traditional academic journals and textbooks can be prohibitively expensive. A single journal subscription can cost thousands of dollars annually – something most individual researchers and smaller institutions cannot afford. Repositories like Shodhganga, NROER, and eGyankosh eliminate this financial barrier entirely, providing students and researchers with access to valuable resources at no cost. This is especially important in a country where many learners come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds or study in institutions with limited library budgets.

Supporting original research and reducing duplication 🔗

Before centralised repositories like Shodhganga existed, doctoral research in India was largely fragmented – theses sat in individual university libraries, often inaccessible beyond the institution. The UGC’s 2009 notification mandating the electronic submission of theses was a pivotal step toward overcoming the serious problem of research duplication and the poor visibility of Indian scholarly work. Researchers can now search what has already been studied, build on existing findings, and ensure their work is situated within the broader academic discourse. Shodhgangotri takes this further by making research-in-progress visible, allowing scholars to identify gaps and potential collaborations even before a thesis is complete.

Enhancing global visibility of Indian research 🔗

Shodhganga’s DOI system and its integration with ORCID iDs for authors ensures that Indian research is discoverable by the global scholarly community – not just within the country. The repository has received visitors from countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Malaysia, demonstrating its reach as an international academic resource. For Indian researchers, this visibility translates into greater academic recognition and the potential for international collaboration.

Supporting distance and lifelong learners 🔗

Platforms like eGyankosh and Swayam Prabha are especially valuable for students enrolled in distance education programmes – a segment that represents a large proportion of India’s higher education enrolment. IGNOU, with a cumulative student strength of over 3.4 million learners, delivers learning material through eGyankosh and its Swayam Prabha channels, making it possible for working adults, people in remote areas, and first-generation learners to access university-level education at their own pace.

The future of institutional repositories in India 🔗

India’s institutional repository ecosystem is at an inflection point. Several converging forces – policy reform, technology, and global open-access movements – are shaping its trajectory.

The One Nation, One Subscription policy 🔗

One of the most ambitious open-access initiatives in the world is currently unfolding in India. The Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy 2020 introduced a “One Nation, One Subscription” (ONOS) model, under which a single centrally-negotiated government payment would provide access to thousands of academic journals from leading publishers. According to a 2025 analysis by MDPI, the deal has been agreed to provide access through a single portal to 13,000 e-journals from 30 publishers for around 18 million students, faculty, researchers, and scientists across 6,300 government-run higher education and research institutions – described as the largest deal of its kind in the world. This does not replace institutional repositories; rather, it complements them by ensuring that subscription-based journal literature is also accessible alongside open-access content.

AI and intelligent discovery 🔗

Artificial intelligence is beginning to transform how users interact with institutional repositories. AI-powered search and recommendation tools can help researchers discover relevant theses, papers, and resources far more efficiently than traditional keyword search. For a repository like Shodhganga – with over five lakh theses across hundreds of disciplines – intelligent metadata tagging, semantic search, and AI-assisted summarisation could dramatically improve discoverability. India’s National Education Policy 2020 explicitly acknowledges AI as a critical area for educational development, pointing toward greater integration of smart technologies across educational platforms.

Multilingual expansion 🔗

India’s linguistic diversity has historically been a challenge for digital academic platforms. Shodhganga’s recent collaboration with Anuvadini/AICTE to implement regional language translation support on its portal is a meaningful step toward making research accessible in Indian languages beyond English. NROER’s mandate to cover resources in all Indian languages reflects the same priority. As more content becomes available in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, and other regional languages, institutional repositories will reach deeper into India’s diverse academic community.

Integration with global research networks 🔗

Indian repositories are increasingly aligning with international open-access frameworks and networks. India’s Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy 2020 also established INDSTA – the Indian Science and Technology Archive of Research – as a centralised open-access hub for India’s research community, designed to connect Indian scholarship with global scientific discourse. Initiatives like IndiaRxiv (a preprint server accepting research in English and Indian languages) and IndiaJOL (a diamond open-access journal platform) are further building the infrastructure for Indian research to participate fully in the global knowledge economy. A 2025 systematic review in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology identified stronger national open-access mandates and improved metadata interoperability as the key drivers that will determine how significantly institutional repositories shape scholarly communication in the years ahead.

India’s institutional repositories have already achieved something genuinely significant: they have made the country’s academic output visible, preserved it for the long term, and opened it up to anyone who wants to learn or research. What began as an effort to archive doctoral theses has grown into a national ecosystem of platforms serving schoolchildren, postgraduates, distance learners, and research scholars alike. The infrastructure is in place. The policies are aligning. The question now is how much further and faster this open-knowledge movement can go.

What do you think? With platforms like Shodhganga and eGyankosh already providing free access to vast collections of academic work, what barriers – technological, linguistic, or awareness-related – still prevent students and researchers in smaller towns and rural India from fully benefiting from these repositories? And as AI begins to reshape how we search and interact with academic content, how should India’s institutional repositories evolve to remain relevant and useful for the next generation of learners?

References

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/nindia.2020.125
2. https://opendoar.ac.uk/
3. https://ncert.nic.in/eresources.php
4. https://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/
5. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/access-to-public-research-data-toolkit_a12e8998-en/the-shodhganga-repository_41ccc70a-en.html
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shodhganga
7. https://www.ignou.ac.in
8. https://creativecommons.org/2013/08/14/india-launches-national-repository-of-open-educational-resources/
9. https://www.ignou.ac.in/pages/57
10. https://blog.mdpi.com/2025/11/25/open-access-in-india/
11. https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.70016