Key Library Consortia in India: INDEST, FORSA, and UGC-Infonet

Indian academic libraries faced a tough problem at the turn of the millennium. The cost of international journals kept climbing, library budgets stayed flat, and no single institution could afford to subscribe to everything its researchers needed. The solution was collaboration. By pooling their purchasing power, libraries could negotiate better prices and share access to expensive electronic resources. This collaborative model is called a library consortium, and three of them shaped the digital research landscape in India: INDEST, FORSA, and UGC-Infonet. Each served a different community, but all worked on the same principle that what one library cannot do alone, many libraries can achieve together.

What is a library consortium? 🔗

A library consortium is a formal group of libraries that come together to share resources and reduce costs. The word “consortium” comes from Latin, meaning partnership or association. The core idea is simple. When libraries negotiate as a single block, publishers offer them lower prices and wider access than any individual library could secure on its own.

Shared subscriptions to electronic resources became a practical way to deal with diminishing budgets, rising journal costs, and growing user demand. Instead of every library paying full price for the same database, members split the cost and gain access to a much larger collection. This is why consortia spread rapidly across Indian higher education during the 2000s.

INDEST consortium 🔗

The Indian National Digital Library in Engineering Science and Technology (INDEST) was set up by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (now the Ministry of Education) in 2003. It was created on the recommendation of an expert group chaired by Prof. N. Balakrishnan from the Indian Institute of Science. The consortium was hosted and coordinated by IIT Delhi.

INDEST was built specifically for technical and engineering education. Its goal was to provide access to selected electronic journals and databases to leading technical institutions, including the IISc, the IITs, the NITs, the IIMs, and other centrally funded government institutions. The Ministry funded the core subscriptions, while participating institutions contributed for additional consortia-based subscriptions.

Objectives and features of INDEST 🔗

The consortium had a clear set of aims. It wanted to build a strong digital collection in engineering and technology, lower the per-institution cost of expensive journals, and remove the disadvantage faced by smaller institutions that could not afford premium databases on their own.

INDEST followed a tiered membership model. There were core member institutions whose subscriptions were fully funded by the government, alongside engineering colleges supported by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and a large group of self-supporting members who paid for their own access through the consortium’s negotiated rates. Because of this structure, the consortium was later renamed INDEST-AICTE.

Impact on technical education 🔗

The reach of INDEST grew quickly. From an initial group of around 38 institutions, membership expanded to over 200 within a few years, covering core members, AICTE-supported colleges, and self-supported institutions. At its peak it provided access to tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journals and bibliographic databases.

The effect on research output was significant. Students and faculty at technical institutions suddenly had desktop access to full-text articles that were previously locked behind costly subscriptions. This narrowed the gap between well-funded and less-funded engineering colleges, and it set a template for how the government could fund shared access across an entire sector.

FORSA and its role in resource sharing 🔗

While INDEST served a broad technical community, the Forum for Resource Sharing in Astronomy and Astrophysics (FORSA) was a specialised consortium for a much smaller and highly focused group. It is one of the oldest resource-sharing initiatives in the country. Its first meeting was held in 1981 at the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, and it began functioning as a forum in the early 1980s.

FORSA brought together the libraries of the major astronomy and astrophysics research institutions in India. Members include the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics, the Physical Research Laboratory, and other centres where astronomy is the primary research focus. These institutions are spread across the country and are affiliated to different government departments.

An open consortium model 🔗

FORSA is often described as an open consortium. This means its participants belong to different funding agencies and ministries, yet they come together voluntarily for mutual benefit. There is no single parent body that controls all the members. Instead, library professionals cooperate because everyone gains from shared access. This bottom-up, professional-driven approach makes FORSA different from government-funded consortia like INDEST.

Activities of FORSA 🔗

The main objective of FORSA is to promote resource sharing among astronomy libraries. Over the years it has supported several practical activities. Members work on union cataloguing, which means merging the catalogues of individual member libraries into a single searchable database. With a combined record of books and journal volumes, a researcher can locate a document anywhere in the network and request it from the holding library.

FORSA also enables inter-library loan and document delivery. If one library does not hold a particular journal or book, it can borrow it from another member. Documents are delivered through email, fax, post, and courier. The forum has negotiated several joint subscriptions for its members as well, including arrangements for online access to journals from major publishers in physics and astronomy. A notable feature of FORSA meetings is that librarians interact directly with practising astronomers, so that the resources purchased match the real needs of the research community.

UGC-Infonet E-Journals Consortium 🔗

The third major initiative addressed the largest community of all, namely the universities. The UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium was launched in 2004 by the University Grants Commission. It was monitored and executed by the INFLIBNET Centre, an inter-university centre of the UGC based in Gandhinagar.

Before UGC-Infonet, most Indian universities could not afford the soaring subscription costs of international electronic journals. Many had even cancelled important titles. The consortium changed this by providing access to scholarly e-resources free of cost to member universities, with the entire programme funded by the UGC.

How UGC-Infonet worked 🔗

UGC-Infonet actually had two connected parts. The first was the UGC-Infonet Connectivity Programme, which built campus-wide networks and provided internet bandwidth to universities. The Education and Research Network (ERNET) managed much of this infrastructure in the early phase. The second part was the Digital Library Consortium, which subscribed to electronic journals and databases on behalf of members.

This was a centrally funded model. Member universities did not contribute to the subscription cost. The UGC covered the full capital investment and the bulk of the recurring expenses. Access was rolled out in phases and offered round the clock, so a researcher could read and download articles from a desktop at any time.

The revolution in university research 🔗

The impact was dramatic. Access was extended to universities covered under Sections 12(B) and 2(f) of the UGC Act, eventually reaching over 200 universities and a number of national law schools. The consortium provided current and archival access to thousands of peer-reviewed journals along with bibliographic databases from a wide range of publishers, covering science, social science, and the humanities.

For the first time, a research scholar at a remote state university could access the same global literature as a scholar at a top metropolitan institution. This helped bridge the digital divide between large and small universities and raised the overall quality of research and teaching. INFLIBNET supported the programme with training, awareness sessions, and usage monitoring to make sure the expensive resources were actually being used.

From three consortia to one unified programme 🔗

An important update keeps this topic current. In December 2015, an expert committee recommended merging three of India’s major consortia into a single unified programme. The Ministry of HRD then formed e-ShodhSindhu by combining the UGC-Infonet Digital Library Consortium, the INDEST-AICTE Consortium, and the NLIST programme.

This means that UGC-Infonet and INDEST as separate consortia are no longer operational in their original form. Their functions now continue under e-ShodhSindhu, which provides access to more than 10,000 core and peer-reviewed journals along with several bibliographic, citation, and factual databases. It serves centrally funded technical institutions, universities, and colleges together, executed by the INFLIBNET Centre. FORSA, being a specialised and independent astronomy forum, continues to operate in its own domain.

Why these consortia matter 🔗

These three consortia tell a clear story about cooperation in Indian academic libraries. INDEST showed how the government could fund shared access for technical education. FORSA proved that even a small, specialised community could build a durable, professional-driven network through voluntary cooperation. UGC-Infonet demonstrated that a centrally funded model could deliver world-class resources to hundreds of universities at once.

Together they laid the foundation for the unified e-ShodhSindhu programme that serves Indian higher education today. The underlying lesson remains the same as it was two decades ago. No single library can hold everything, but a well-organised consortium can put the world’s scholarship within reach of every member.

What do you think? If you were planning a new consortium for your own field of study, would you prefer a centrally funded model like UGC-Infonet or a voluntary, professional-driven model like FORSA? How might consortia need to change as more journals move toward open access?

References

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1057231703902013
2. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/lisp8/chapter/digital-library-initiatives-in-india-part-ii/
3. https://testbook.com/question-answer/forsa-is-a-______–64e775b45cf5779a50c602f7
4. https://prints.iiap.res.in/handle/2248/3922
5. https://www.stsci.edu/stsci/meetings/lisa3/louisc.html
6. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S009913331400069X
7. https://ebooks.inflibnet.ac.in/lisp5/chapter/library-consortium-ugc-infonet-digital-library/
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-ShodhSindhu