This progress is evidenced by India’s status as one of the largest producers of fruits, vegetables, and dairy, aided by the veterinary sciences and animal husbandry. In 1974, India conducted its first nuclear test (Operation Smiling Buddha) in Pokhran, moved towards enhancing its energy production, and by 1975, it had developed its own satellite, Aryabhata. Initially dependent on imports such as US wheat and tinned milk from the Netherlands, India quickly achieved food self-sufficiency by invoking “Green Revolution” which was followed by “White Revolution” through Amul Cooperative Society, and “Poultry Revolution”. From the 1980s, various Technology Missions helped achieve such goals. The flagship programmes of the Indian government to improve the nutritional status of children and reduce incidence of malnutrition through the Integrated Child Development Scheme and Mid-Day Meal Scheme are exemplary, not to say of other pro-poor welfare schemes and rural development. Even, the first wave of Indian professionals to work abroad included graduates from the world-class technical institutions established in the post-independence era.

However, despite these noteworthy foundational accomplishments, the quality of research and innovation in India has stagnated over the past two to three decades. This is alarming, particularly because other nations—including the countries that lagged far behind India just 40–50 years ago—have rapidly advanced. With a population of 1.4 billion, a growing focus on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, and a shortage of job opportunities, India is today at a crucial juncture. Addressing these challenges requires a unified effort from the government, the academia-intelligentsia, and industry. Through appropriate policies, resources, and a shift in research culture, India will acquire the potential to regain its place as a global leader in research and innovation.

Nonetheless, for action after introspection, the relevant data pertaining to our research performance are quite troubling. Some of these may be elaborated below: 

1. Citation Impact: According to the “Scimago Journal & Country Rank” (SJR), which assesses academic impact globally, India ranks outside the top 100 countries for citations per document across all subject areas (https://www.scimagojr.com/countryrank.php), including Sciences, Life Sciences, Engineering, Humanities and Social Sciences. Indian research averages only 12.7 citations per document, significantly trailing countries like the United States, Canada, and scores of countries in Europe, which exceed 25-30 citations per paper. Researchers from several Asian countries, including Saudi Arabia (17.6), Nepal (15.2), Oman (15.1), and Bangladesh (14.5), also surpass India in citation impact. While India performs slightly better in Engineering and Sciences, its ranking is notably lower in Arts and Humanities.

2. H-Index Ranking: India is not among the top 20 nations in terms of the h-index across all subject areas, which measures scientific productivity and citation impact. Although India has largest population, the number of citable documents produced (2.7 million) is significantly lower than that of countries like the USA (14 million) and China (10 million). Particularly the emphasis is quite less in publishing in high ranked journals in the fields of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities.

3. Top-tier [Q1] Journal Publications: High-ranking institutions are often evaluated by their contributions to Q1 (top quartile) journals, representing the top 25% in each field. India’s highest-ranking institutions—the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS, New Delhi)—are positioned only at 1346 and 1360 globally.

(https://www.scimagoir.com/rankings.php?sector=Higher+educ.&country=IND).

For example, if one looks(Fig.1) at the declining publications in the journals of repute by the researchers at a highest funded, historic and a largest residential public university, the Aligarh Muslim University(AMU), then the scenario gets quite depressing, hence, a matter of great concern.

Fig.1: The research ranking of the Aligarh Muslim University refers to the volume, impact and quality of the institution’s research output. On the X-axis is year and Y-axis is global ranking.
Source: https://www.scimagoir.com/institution.php?idp=3231#google_vignette

4. Global Innovation Index (GII): In the 2024 Global Innovation Index, India ranked 39th out of 160 economies (https://www.wipo.int/gii-ranking/en/india), indicating room for improvement in innovation capacity.

5. Patent Generation: India granted only 0.03 million patents compared to 0.8 million in China and 0.3 million in the United States, illustrating a significant lag in protecting and commercializing intellectual property.

For instance, if one looks (Fig.2) at the declining number of innovation ranking of AMU, the issue is again quite alarming.

Fig.2: The innovation ranking of the Aligarh Muslim University, which is calculated on the number of patent applications of the institution and the citations that its research output receives from patents. On the X-axis is year and on Y-axis is innovation ranking.
Source: https://www.scimagoir.com/institution.php?idp=3231#google_vignette

Root causes of this decline in our academia:

In our estimation, several factors contribute to India’s declining research quality and innovation output, such as:

1. Evaluation standards focused on quantity: Academic institutions often emphasise the quantity of publications rather than quality. Shifting focus to high-impact research would reward rigorous, ethical research practices and enhance India’s international credibility. Prioritising quality over quantity attracts international collaborations and investment, creating an environment that promotes scientific integrity. Strict standards for recruitment, based purely on merit and publication in reputable journals and books, are sometimes compromised. Promotions to higher-level positions are not stringently monitored by institutions. People who publish in journals or magazines that are not even indexed by the h-index are often promoted readily. Publications with publishers that lack rigorous standards and anonymous peer review are accepted without scrutiny. Furthermore, student feedback in both letter and spirit is frequently ignored in universities and colleges.

The primary focus of faculty members in academic institutions therefore should remain on their core responsibilities of research and teaching. These activities not only contribute to personal academic growth but also significantly enhance the institution’s reputation and academic excellence. Engaging in meaningful research furthers the frontiers of knowledge, while effective teaching shapes the next generation of scholars and professionals.

2. Insufficient R&D investment: India’s research and development expenditure is less than 0.7% of GDP, placing it outside the top 150 countries for R&D investment.

In contrast, the developed nations such as the USA (3.5%), Germany (3.1%), and Israel (5.5%) allocate much more for R&D. Even some developing countries, such as Cuba (11.5%) and Oman (6.8%), outspend India in this area. Thus, adequate funding is essential for basic research, which forms the foundation for applied sciences and technology development. This is why it is paramount to strengthen basic research laboratories. 

3. Inadequate focus on basic sciences: Without robust fundamental research in the basic sciences, the applied researches cannot progress. Industries often hesitate to fund basic research due to its indirect, long-term returns. However, government’s substantial financial support is essential here. Breakthroughs in medical technologies, like X-rays, MRI, PET scans, and radiotherapy were made possible by early investments in basic sciences. To foster innovation, India must prioritize basic research alongside applied sciences.

4. Urgent need for financial support in colleges and public universities: To ensure the quality of education in colleges and public universities, it is imperative to prioritise financial support for critical infrastructure. Laboratory courses, which are central to hands-on learning, have been significantly affected by the lack of equipment. Decades ago, these institutions boasted better-equipped laboratories, allowing students to explore and innovate. However, over the past four to five decades, there has been a marked deterioration in these facilities, leaving many students unable to gain practical skills in key areas. Equally concerning is the condition of libraries, which are fundamental to fostering independent learning and research. Many institutions struggle to maintain updated collections of books, journals, and other resources due to insufficient funding. Addressing this issue is vital to bridging the gap between students’ learning potential and the resources available to them.  Moreover, the shortage of faculty members poses a significant challenge. In many colleges, the faculty strength is considerably below the required levels, compromising the quality of instruction and mentorship.  This situation directly impacts the ability of institutions to maintain academic rigor and to support students effectively.  

5. Limited Institutional Autonomy: Granting universities and research institutions more academic and administrative autonomy would enable them to respond quickly to emerging research needs. Accountability frameworks should be in place to uphold ethical standards, ensuring that institutions remain credible and internationally competitive.

A Curious Case of the AMU: Nepotism and Inbreeding Corroding Meritocracy

Let the foregoing discussion be illustrated with the instance of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), a significantly funded, large residential university. There appears to be an increasing trend where around 20% to 25% of the AMU teachers perennially prioritise grabbing administrative positions including those positions traditionally designated only for the non-teaching staff. Extracting this undue benefit has gone up to the extent that even the positions of the statutory officers are filled in on ad hoc basis, in flagrant violation of the UGC rules, and even on illegal basis, as revealed in a recent information obtained through the RTI Act 2005. Some of these “Non-Teaching Professors” have delayed obtaining their PhD degree and have been happily continuing in the administrative positions.

This sorry state of affairs is owing to the fact that, this is often to gain associated “material” benefits over and above salary, including, institutional vehicles with drivers and security personnel serving as domestic servants of the teacher-officers, at the expense of the University exchequer. Many of these teachers have been holding such positions for an outrageously long time, for the last many years, uninterruptedly. Their poor CVs, with no significant/respectable research output, adversely affect the ranking of the University.

AMU, unlike all other central universities (CUs), has got an overwhelming hegemony of the internal teachers inside its Executive Council which also empanels its Vice Chancellors. In the last two empanelment (2017 and 2023), only internal teachers have succeeded in becoming AMU-VCs. This aggravates the practice of nepotism and inbreeding in recruitments and promotions, at the expense of meritocracy. This has had an additional corrosive effect on research output of AMU.

Having developed deeply entrenched, strong clout, they incapacitate successive VCs and create layers of red-tapism just in order to harass and humiliate academically accomplished teachers. The overall atmosphere and ecosystem of the University is made anti-academic. The academically productive ones are harassed by delaying/denying promotions to them, as the VCs are perennially under the pressure of this internal hegemony. Internal teachers becoming as VCs of AMU do not have the independence (or guts) to act against these interests with whom they have been living, working and will continue to live with them even after completing their tenures as VC!

Non-teaching positions are typically designed to support administrative and operational functions, ensuring the smooth running of the University, and are best suited for personnel with expertise in these areas. Unfortunately, these roles are increasingly being used for personal advantage, benefiting the teachers themselves, their family members, and their friends. At some places, the prolonged (rather than a brief tenure) occupation of such positions has led to the formation of regional and sub-regional layers of hegemony and therefore unbridled nepotism in enrolments, recruitments and promotions. These maladies are actively destroying the academic ethos of teaching and research.

Needless to say, this shift in focus dilutes the academic mission and also undermines the intended division of responsibilities within the universities.

By prioritising research and teaching over such non-academic roles, faculty members can better align with the university’s objectives of fostering an environment of intellectual rigour and student development. Clear policies and guidelines can further help delineate responsibilities, ensuring that non-teaching roles are fulfilled efficiently by the appropriate staff while enabling faculty members to concentrate on their academic and scholarly pursuits. This alignment benefits not only the institution but also the broader academic community.

Just as in AMU, other universities too must have got their own general as well as more specific problems. Insiders of those universities also need to expose their endemic problems on these counts.

By tackling the abovementioned critical challenges head-on, India can revitalise its research ecosystem and emerge as a dominant force in the global knowledge economy. Is the government really prepared to listen?

Achieving this vision calls for a concerted effort: substantial government funding, a robust fellowship system based purely on merit, and strong collaboration between academia and industry. With strategic investments, a transformative approach to academic assessment, and greater institutional autonomy, India is poised not only to advance ground-breaking research and innovation but also to become a global beacon of knowledge and progress.

Sajjad Athar is a Professor of Physics at AMU, Aligarh, a renowned name in nuclear physics, a co-author with the Nobel Laureate Prof. Takaki Kajita who tweets @Mohamma84063425;  Mohammad Sajjad is a Professor of History at AMU who tweets @sajjadhist.

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Before we understand this scheme and its implications, it is important to understand the contextual dynamics in which this scheme is being announced.

The global academic publishing industry had a worldwide sales amounting to more than $19 Billion USD in 2020. The industry is profitable for the large players so much so that the biggest companies in the sector—Elsevier and Springer-Nature had better profit margins than tech giants like Google, IBM etc in the year 2023.  This lucrative business is possible due to the inherent flaws in the system that exploit the contributions of researchers, institutions, and governments while maintaining tight control over the dissemination of knowledge. These flaws include the monopolization of journals, exorbitant subscription fees, and the prevalence of paywalls that restrict access to publicly funded research.

Academic publishers capitalize on the unpaid labour of researchers, who conduct studies, write papers, and even peer-review submissions without compensation. Once accepted, the publishers charge institutions hefty subscription fees to access the very work those institutions helped produce, creating a closed-loop system that disproportionately benefits the publishers at the expense of academic accessibility.

Moreover, the “publish or perish” culture forces researchers to prioritize high-impact journals owned by major publishers, further strengthening their market dominance. This cycle is exacerbated by the high costs of open-access publishing fees, which often shift the financial burden onto researchers or their institutions, making equitable access to knowledge even harder to achieve.

Despite the growing calls for reforms, such as mandating open-access policies and promoting alternative publishing models, these systemic issues persist, driven by entrenched interests and the lack of unified resistance from the academic community. As an alternative, there are two types of access protocols/frameworks that are followed across the word:

2025. Gold Open Access provides unrestricted online access to scholarly research, typically free of charge to readers. It includes articles, books, and other academic outputs available immediately or after an embargo period, often published in open-access journals or repositories. Japan has issued a mandate that all articles resulting from nationally funded research must be made Open Access immediately upon publication as of 2025. The United States also has made a similar mandate.
2026. Green Open Access, a subset of Open Access, refers to the self-archiving of research by authors. Authors deposit their work in institutional or subject-specific repositories, allowing free access, even if the original publication is behind a paywall. Green Access may involve compliance with publisher policies, including embargo periods before the work becomes freely accessible.

Now what does this have to with India and it launching One Nation-One Subscription?

India has largely followed the Green Open Access model but as already stated above, this system is plagued by not only a restriction on accessing the final version of the paper but also the embargo period by the publishers. This is for the people who are publishing out of India. For those who want to see the international journals or access the articles published by journals who have restricted access—they either have to be a part of the institution which has subscribed to those journals, or they would have to be able to afford the exorbitant subscription/article price. This exclusionary system obviously keeps researchers away from accessing knowledge from across the world. Thus, through the ONOS scheme, the government pays for the subscriptions, enabling students, researchers, and faculty from publicly funded institutions to access these journals.

Understanding the current system for accessing journal articles

Before ONOS, Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in India accessed journals through a fragmented system of different library consortia, each under the administrative control of various ministries. A library consortium is a group of libraries collaborating to fulfil common needs like resource sharing. For instance, the UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium, managed by the INFLIBNET Centre (Information and Library Network Centre) under the Ministry of Education, provides access to selected scholarly electronic journals and databases. Besides these consortia, HEIs also subscribe to journals individually. Other than these, the science and astrophysics related FORSA with participation from premier institutes such as Tata Institute of Fundamental Research also exist. This disaggregated approach has resulted in limited access for many institutions and overlapping subscriptions leading to unnecessary expenditures. It was estimated that India’s institutions spend more than Rs.1500 Crore for the subscriptions.

Details of the ONOS scheme

ONOS seeks to address these issues by centralising journal subscriptions for nearly 6,300 government-run HEIs, including universities, colleges, and institutions of national importance. The scheme will provide equitable access to 13,000 scholarly journals under a single platform, which is set to become operational on January 1, 2025. This common platform will host journals published by 30 renowned international publishers, including Elsevier Science Direct, Springer Nature, Wiley Blackwell Publishing, Taylor & Francis, and many others. All participating institutions will only need to register on the platform to access these journals.

INFLIBNET has been designated as the implementing agency for ONOS, responsible for coordinating the national subscription and making central payments to the publishers. The central government has already negotiated a single subscription price for each of the 30 publishers. Notably, if institutions require access to journals beyond the 13,000 provided on the platform, they can still subscribe to them individually.

The ONOS scheme has been allocated a substantial budget of ₹6,000 crore (approximately US$715 million) for three calendar years – 2025, 2026, and 2027. This investment aims to benefit a vast population of 55 lakh to nearly 1.8 crore students, faculty, and researchers across the 6,300 participating institutions. It will especially benefit institutions in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities that previously struggled to afford expensive journal subscriptions.

Is there a catch?

There is no catch; not immediately. While ONOS has been widely lauded for its potential to democratise knowledge access, there is a concern.

The most prominent concern revolves around the scheme’s focus on a subscription-based model at a time when the global research ecosystem is increasingly shifting towards Open Access (OA) publishing. OA publishing models, particularly gold OA, charge authors an Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication, making the research freely accessible. Critics argue that investing in traditional subscriptions could be a short-sighted approach given the growing popularity of OA. This criticism is especially valid in 2024 when more than 50% of papers published in the last four years worldwide are open access.

Another issue is the lack of clarity on whether the portal will be accessible to only students or also to the general public, including independent researchers. While this can be incorporated as the plan rolls out, it is important for India to use its leverage to make it easier for its own research ecosystem to thrive by striking a deal for lesser APCs.

Conclusion

The scheme’s substantial budget and wide reach provide an opportunity to incorporate OA principles within this deal. The government could explore negotiating with publishers for reduced APCs for Indian researchers or invest in developing institutional repositories to promote green OA, where authors self-archive their work, making it freely accessible. This could preserve the contributions of academic worldwide to make Open Access a reality.

ONOS is undoubtedly a significant step towards democratizing knowledge access in India. While acknowledging the criticisms and potential challenges, it is crucial to recognize the scheme’s potential to transform India’s research landscape. It will have to be clubbed with much needed higher research funding and better infrastructure to realise India’s scientific potential.

(The author is a legal researcher with the organisation)

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