India Bought Journals But Not Textbooks Why ONOS Misses the Real Access Problem
In January 2025, India made a choice that should change how the country thinks about education access for a generation.
The government committed roughly ₹6,000 crore over three years to buy national access to about 13,000 international journals from 30 major publishers, including Elsevier, Wiley, and Springer. The scheme, One Nation One Subscription, was presented as a breakthrough for research. In many ways, it was one.
For decades, Indian students and researchers lived inside a strange contradiction. Their institutions asked them to produce world-class research, but many could not legally read the papers they needed. Library budgets were too small. Publisher bundles were too expensive. Access depended on whether a campus had money, bargaining power, and administrative will. For many, Sci-Hub became less a rebellion than a symptom.
ONOS changed part of that equation. It showed that India could bargain as one buyer, not as thousands of small and unequal institutions. It brought serious public money to a real access problem. Download numbers reportedly crossed ten crore within the first year, a sign that the demand was always there. The locked door had been the issue.
Yet the scheme also leaves two doors closed.
It does not cover most private universities, where a large share of Indian students study. More importantly, it does not touch the books students are required to buy semester after semester. ONOS buys journal access. It does not buy the Elsevier medical textbook, the Wiley engineering title, the law manual, the management casebook, or the core reading that appears on a syllabus and then shows up at the photocopy shop outside the campus gate.
India proved that publisher pricing is not fixed in stone when a government negotiates collectively. The tragedy is simpler than it looks. It negotiated for the journal shelf, while the everyday student access crisis often sits on the textbook shelf.
ONOS solved a real problem, but not the whole problem
ONOS deserves credit before it receives critique. Too many education debates collapse into cynicism, as if every public effort must be treated as failure unless it solves everything at once. That would be unfair here.
The old system of academic journal access in India had a built-in inequality. Some central institutions and better-funded research centres could afford strong subscriptions. Many state universities, smaller colleges, and research scholars outside elite campuses could not. A PhD scholar in one city might download a paper legally, while another scholar studying the same topic elsewhere had to request PDFs through friends, email authors, or search pirated repositories.
That kind of unequal access weakens the entire research system. It slows literature reviews. It narrows reading habits. It makes citation patterns depend on availability rather than relevance. It pushes young researchers to build arguments from whatever they can get, not always from what they most need.
By pooling demand at the national level, ONOS shifted bargaining power. Instead of each institution negotiating separately with global publishers, the government stepped in as a large buyer. That matters. A publisher can ignore one underfunded library. It cannot ignore a country with one of the world’s largest higher education systems.
This is why the One Nation One Subscription ONOS scheme India journals deal is more than a procurement decision. It is proof of concept. It says India can use public purchasing power to reset access terms in education.
The scheme also carries symbolic weight. It recognises that knowledge access is infrastructure. Laboratories need equipment. Classrooms need teachers. Researchers need literature. A journal article sitting behind a paywall can be as real a barrier as a broken instrument in a lab.
For researchers in government-funded institutions, ONOS can mean faster work and broader reading. For faculty, it can improve teaching and supervision. For libraries, it can reduce the impossible task of choosing which subscriptions to keep and which to drop.
Yet a policy can be both meaningful and incomplete. ONOS expanded access where the research system needed help. It did not end the access problem for higher education as a whole.
That distinction matters because the public story around ONOS often suggests that India has now dealt with the paywall crisis. It has not. It has dealt with one major layer of it.
The remaining layer sits closer to the classroom.
The first blind spot is who gets left outside
ONOS applies to government-funded higher education and research institutions. That boundary is not a small administrative detail. It shapes who gets access and who remains outside it.
India’s higher education system is not made up only of central universities, IITs, IISERs, national institutes, and government research labs. A large share of students study in private universities and private colleges. Many estimates place private institutions at roughly seventy per cent of Indian universities. Even allowing for variation in enrolment patterns, the policy line is clear: a very large part of the system does not automatically benefit.
This creates a difficult political and ethical question. If public money pays for access, should private institutions be included? The answer is not simple. Some private institutions charge high fees and can afford subscriptions. Others serve first-generation learners, local students, and families stretching finances to pay tuition. The word “private” hides huge differences.
Leaving all private institutions outside ONOS may look fiscally clean, but it preserves an old inequality. Two students in the same discipline, reading the same syllabus, may live in different access worlds. One can open a journal through the national deal. The other cannot, even if their academic needs are identical.
That difference also affects faculty and researchers. Private universities increasingly employ early-career academics who publish, supervise, and compete for grants. If they lack access, the national research system loses potential. Knowledge access does not become less important because a campus has a different ownership structure.
A better design would separate public purpose from institutional category. If an institution teaches recognised degree programmes, enrols Indian students, undergoes accreditation, and contributes to national research and workforce development, it has a claim in the access debate.
That does not mean the government must subsidise every private institution equally. There are middle paths:
Private universities could join through a regulated co-payment model.
Fees could vary by enrolment, discipline, or institutional revenue.
Scholarships or access pools could prioritise students from low-income backgrounds.
Accreditation rules could require institutions to provide minimum legal access to core research materials.
State governments could build add-on agreements for their own college networks.
The point is not that every institution must receive the same subsidy. The point is that the current boundary leaves too many students on the wrong side of a policy built in the name of national access.
ONOS speaks the language of “one nation”. Its coverage still reflects a divided system.
The second blind spot is the textbook shelf
The deeper gap is not about institutional eligibility. It is about the kind of material ONOS covers.
Journal articles and textbooks are not interchangeable. They serve different academic functions. A journal article reports a specific study, argument, review, or technical development. A textbook structures a course. It defines what a student must know week by week. It carries diagrams, solved examples, exercises, cases, drug classifications, engineering principles, legal doctrines, or accounting techniques. It is the backbone of many classrooms.
A student assigned a medical textbook from Elsevier gains little from a journal subscription if the exam, practical, and lecture plan all follow the textbook. An engineering student asked to refer to a Wiley title cannot replace it with a set of research articles. A first-year student learning the basics of anatomy, thermodynamics, corporate finance, or constitutional law needs organised teaching material, not only cutting-edge papers.
This is why textbook access reform India cannot be treated as a side issue. It is the daily access issue.
Textbook prices hurt differently from journal paywalls. A journal paywall usually appears at the moment of research. A textbook cost appears at the start of every semester. It is visible to families. It competes with rent, food, transport, exam fees, hostel costs, coaching, and devices. In professional courses, the reading list can become a major hidden cost of education.
When students cannot afford prescribed books, they do what the system has trained them to do. They borrow, share, scan, download, or photocopy. The photocopy shop outside the gate survives because it solves an immediate problem at a price students can pay.
This does not make copyright irrelevant. Authors deserve payment. Publishers invest in editing, production, distribution, and updates. Good textbooks take labour. The answer cannot be to pretend that copying has no cost.
But law and morality become fragile when the official route is priced beyond ordinary use. If a required book costs too much for a large share of the class, the illegal copy becomes the default learning infrastructure. The system may condemn it, but the timetable depends on it.
India has seen this tension before. The public debate around university photocopying, course packs, and educational use made one thing clear: students were not copying because they disliked books. They were copying because the legal market did not meet them where they were.
ONOS did not change that market. It was never designed to.
Why the photocopy economy is a policy signal
The photocopy economy is often treated as a legal nuisance. It is more useful to treat it as data.
Every copied chapter, shared PDF, and informal course pack points to a mismatch between syllabus design, publisher pricing, library capacity, and student affordability. It tells administrators that the prescribed reading system is underfunded. It tells publishers that the market price does not match the purchasing power of the class. It tells government that access policy cannot stop at research journals.
The photocopy shop is not outside the education system. It is part of the shadow system that keeps the official one functioning.
That is uncomfortable, but it is true. Many courses move ahead because students find unofficial ways to get readings. Faculty often know this. Libraries often know this. Publishers know this. Everyone lives with the contradiction because nobody has built a better legal route at scale.
ONOS shows that scale is the missing ingredient. Individual students cannot bargain with Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, McGraw Hill, Pearson, or Indian academic publishers. Individual colleges often cannot bargain well either. Even large universities face budget limits and complex licensing terms.
A national or sector-wide textbook access agreement would change the conversation. It would not need to buy every book in the world. It could begin with the books actually prescribed across Indian higher education.
That difference is crucial.
A smart textbook policy would start from syllabi, not publisher catalogues. It would ask:
Which titles are repeatedly assigned in high-enrolment courses?
Which disciplines create the heaviest textbook costs?
Which books are essential for professional accreditation?
Which titles have affordable Indian editions, and which do not?
Which courses can shift to open educational resources without hurting quality?
Which books need digital lending, print access, or both?
The government does not need to guess. Universities already generate this information through reading lists, library acquisition requests, exam patterns, and curriculum documents. The data is scattered, but it exists.
Once collected, it could support a new bargain. India could negotiate licences for prescribed textbooks in medicine, engineering, law, science, commerce, social science, and other high-demand fields. The goal would be lawful access at a price that matches Indian educational realities.
This would not end the sale of books. It would create a floor of access. Students who want personal print copies could still buy them. Libraries could still stock physical editions. Publishers could still sell premium materials, updated editions, and specialist texts. But the core required reading would no longer depend on whether a student can afford a full-price copy in week one.
That is the lesson ONOS offers. The state can bargain where the individual cannot.
What a textbook access policy could look like
A textbook version of ONOS should not simply copy the journal model. Textbooks are used differently. They are taught, assigned, revisited, marked up, and carried into exams and labs. A workable policy would need to reflect that.
The first step is to define the target clearly. The aim should be prescribed course material, not unlimited access to every publisher catalogue. This keeps the policy focused and defensible. It also prevents wasteful spending on material that few students use.
A national textbook access mission could have five practical layers.
Build a verified national reading list map
India needs a clearer picture of what students are actually asked to read. Universities and colleges could submit semester-wise required readings in a standard format. Professional councils and accreditation bodies could help identify essential texts in regulated fields.
This map would show where costs concentrate. It may reveal that a small number of titles drive a large share of student spending in some courses. It may also show where locally written or open resources can replace expensive imports.
The result would be better policy and better library planning.
Negotiate licences for high-demand prescribed books
The government could negotiate with major academic publishers for legal digital access to selected textbooks. Pricing could be based on enrolment bands, disciplines, or actual usage. The licence terms should allow reading across devices, library access, and reasonable offline use where connectivity is uneven.
This matters because access that works only on a perfect campus network will fail many students. India’s higher education system extends far beyond elite residential campuses. Any national policy must work for commuter colleges, rural campuses, and students who rely on shared devices or patchy internet.
Include private institutions through a fair payment model
A textbook scheme that excludes private universities would repeat one of ONOS’s central limits. Yet a blanket public subsidy may be politically hard to defend.
A graded model would work better. Government institutions could receive full or near-full support. Private non-profit or lower-fee institutions could join at subsidised rates. High-fee institutions could pay more. Student-level support could target those with financial need, regardless of institution type.
Such a model would recognise that access is a student issue, not only an institution issue.
Protect authors while lowering student costs
A strong public licence can pay creators more fairly than piracy does. If India negotiates openly and at scale, it can build a compensation system that rewards use while reducing illegal copying.
Authors should not be treated as obstacles to access. Many write textbooks to teach well. Many also want their books to be read by the students who need them. A national licensing model can align those goals better than the current mix of unaffordable books and unpaid copying.
Publishers, too, can benefit from predictable revenue. The current informal market already limits sales. A legal, large-scale agreement may convert some of that lost market into paid access.
Invest in Indian open textbooks
Licensing commercial textbooks is only half the answer. India also needs public investment in high-quality open textbooks written and reviewed by Indian academics.
Open textbooks work best when they are not treated as cheap substitutes. They need editorial support, peer review, translation, updates, accessibility checks, and teacher adoption. They also need respect. If open materials are seen as low-quality PDFs kept on a forgotten portal, students will not benefit.
A serious open textbook programme could focus on foundational undergraduate courses with high enrolment. It could support English and Indian-language editions. It could include problem sets, diagrams, lab manuals, and teacher guides.
This is where the inspirational promise becomes real. India has the academic talent to write for its own classrooms. It has the scale to make those books matter. What it needs is the same seriousness it brought to journal negotiation.
The unfinished half of ONOS is the real opportunity
ONOS changed the terms of the debate. Before it, the access problem was often described as unavoidable. Journals were expensive, libraries were limited, and students found their own way. After ONOS, that fatalism is harder to defend.
India has now shown that national bargaining can open locked knowledge systems. It has shown that access can be treated as public infrastructure. It has shown that the state can sit across from the world’s largest academic publishers and negotiate from strength.
That achievement should not be used to close the conversation. It should be used to widen it.
The next question is not whether India can afford better textbook access. The better question is whether India can afford to keep ignoring the cost of required reading. A higher education system that expands enrolment without solving material access quietly transfers the burden to students. It asks them to pay tuition, then pay again to read what the tuition requires them to learn.
The country does not need a romantic defence of piracy. It needs a legal system that makes piracy less necessary. It needs course readings that are affordable by design. It needs libraries funded for teaching, not only research. It needs publishers treated as negotiating partners, not price-setters beyond public challenge. It needs students seen not as consumers at the end of a sales chain, but as the reason the chain exists.
ONOS opened the journal door. That matters. For researchers, it may shape careers. For institutions, it may raise ambition. For Indian science and scholarship, it is a serious step.
But the student standing outside the photocopy shop is asking a different question. Not “Can I access the latest journal article?” but “Can I get the book my teacher assigned before the test next week?”
A national education policy must be able to answer both.
The unfinished half of ONOS is not a technical add-on. It is the part that meets students where learning begins: the syllabus, the classroom, the library counter, the shared hostel room, and yes, the photocopy shop outside the gate.
India bought the journals. Now it must bargain for the books.
