UGC India has mandated electronic submission of PhD Theses via the UGC Minimum Standards and Procedure for the award of M.Phil/Ph.D. degree) Regulation 2009. According to this regulation, all universities are required to submit a soft copy of MPhil/PhD Thesis to the UGC, within a period of 30 days from announcement of the award of degree, for hosting in the central repository Shodhganga.

Indian Universities are now aggressively working on digitization of theses and dissertations. And  most most of the universities have now also started collecting digital copies i.e ETDs.

"Shodhganga" is the name coined to denote digital repository of Indian Electronic Theses and Dissertations set-up by the INFLIBNET Centre. The word "Shodh" originates from Sanskrit and stands for research and discovery. The "Ganga" is the largest and longest of all rivers in Indian subcontinent. The Ganga is the symbol of India's age-long culture and civilisation. Shodhganga stands for the reservoir of Indian intellectual output stored in a repository.

The Shodhganga@INFLIBNET is set-up using an open source digital repository software DSpace developed by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in partnership between Hewlett- Packard (HP). 

Shodhganga provides a platform for research scholars to deposit their Ph.D. theses and make it available to the entire scholarly community in open access. The repository has the ability to capture, index, store, disseminate and preserve ETDs (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) submitted by the researchers.

Universities in India are also focussing on the issues of plagiarism in research. Many workshops and reference management tools trainings have been organised by various Universities in India.

The current status of Sodhganga -e-thesis repository is as follows:

Many Universities and institutions in India have taken taken individual initiatives towards setting up ETD Repositories like ETD@IISc, Vidyanidhi - University of Mysore, Eprint@IIT Delhi, etc. Besides, many collaborative initiatives have also been taken by many institutions like KrishiPrabha - Indian Agricultural Doctoral Dissertation Repository, CSIR Explorations, etc.

Digitization of all the theses and dissertations housed in Central Library, JNU was started in July, 2012 and was completed in a time bound manner by December, 2012. All digitized theses and dissertations have been uploaded on local server; and have been catalogued in Integrated Library Management Software - Virtua. All borne digital theses and dissertations received have also uploaded uploaded on the local server and catalogued in Virtua. Thus, now entire collection of approximately 22,000 theses and dissertations are accessible online on JNU intranet from any part of the JNU Campus. Besides, as per MoU signed with INFLIBNET Centre, open access to 5,150 Ph.D. theses have been made available through Shodhganga - Central Repository created by INFLIBNET Centre, Ahmadabad with three years embargo period.

Furthermore, the University envisioned and started developing its own online repository of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). Although, JNU’s PhD theses are available in Shodhganga, its ETD Repository envisages making MPhil Dissertations available in public domain along with PhD theses. The university has framed its policy for availability of ETDs under open access with an embargo period of three years. The requisite infrastructure for development of JNU’s ETD Repository is ready; work is progressing with a rapid pace and it is expected to make it available at http://etd.lib.jnu.ac.in very soon.