India faces many great challenges as it embarks on its ambitious economic and social advancement agenda. One of these challenges is the large-scale transformation of its education system. The country's success in knowledge-intensive industries and software services is showing the way for a potential leadership role in the global knowledge society. However, there are many problems that require attention. One-third of the population is dealing with problems of illiteracy and poor education, particularly distinct in women and poor rural residents, while only 20% of the population reach high school. The higher education system in India also faces a series of serious issues including; inadequate infrastructure, technological constraints, lack of high-skilled teachers and poor quality of educational resources.

Despite these challenges, India has one of the largest higher education systems in the world, with 311 universities, 15,600 colleges and 2.5 million graduates on an annual basis. In addition, universities in India are increasingly embracing online learning as a means to enhance access to quality higher education opportunities. In 2005, the National Knowledge Commission (NKC) in India was appointed to improve access and build excellence in the education system in order to scale educational opportunity and meet learning challenges of the 21st century. It launched a strategy for addressing pressing educational problems by exploring opportunities with widely available Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Open Access (OA) as a means of radically increasing the widespread availability of high-quality educational resources to deliver excellence in a Indian cultural context. An important player in the Open Source Software (OSS) movement embracing initiatives like D-Space, India is also investing in strengthening its position in OA by increasing availability of open access electronic journals and repositories.

The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), India's national distance learning university with 1.8 million students, has uploaded a vast amount of open access teaching resources online, stored in the D-Space repository and available on YouTube through eGyonKosh. Most videos are in English - common language of higher education in India - and some in Hindi, from many different faculties and a staggering number of resources that they produce for dissemination through several satellite channels in India. This educational material is broadcasted several hours per day to distance students. The aim seems to be to find effective ways to create an online program where students will be able to get online mentoring and accreditation scheme. There is something here for everyone, the researcher and practitioner that is looking into the education system and pediagogical models in India, the teacher and learner looking for educational resources unique to India and Asia. On his blog, Stian Haklev, talks about his attempt to assign readings from these repositories to his classes at the Peer2Peer University, he also sheds light to the fact that all these resources although under an open access scheme, are not under a Creative Commons license. Stian is making a very important point and turning attention to what is, in my personal opinion, a unique opportunity for the wider acceptance and dissemination of OERs in India.

In contrast to the open source and open access initiatives, OER efforts in higher education are not as ambitious, with only a handful of major initiatives specifically aimed at creating open educational materials and tools focused mainly on science and engineering education.

One major initiative is the National Program on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) with 6,000 hours of video, over 25,500 subscribers and 1.5 million channel views. NPTEL is a joint venture by the seven major Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Science which was decided after many deliberations between the Indian Institutes of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and funded by the Ministry of Human Resource Development to enhance the quality of engineering education by developing curriculum-based video and web courses.

Another initiative is Ekalavya, launched by the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, funded mainly by the private sector. It is called Ekalavya, because in Indian mythology, Ekalavya wished to perfect his talent but did not have a 'Guru' to show him the way. The Ekalavya portal aims to act as an interactive platform for the creation, absorption, dissemination and usage of content developed in various Indian languages and as a free knowledge and idea exchange for individuals and communities. According to their website, materials are likely to be distributed under a Creative Commons in the near future.

Although these initiatives provide great hope for the future, there needs to be a systematic effort to design a national strategy in India for the development, adoption and dissemination of OERs for a wider audience of teachers, practitioners and learners. This will require the involvement of key institutions in diverse knowledge areas like humanities, arts, medicine and science to develop high-quality web-based open content repositories and make it available for global consumption. It will also require making connections to major OER initiatives worldwide and joining forces with the highly successful software sector for developing tools and technologies for teaching and researching.

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