Friends, I just saw Mr Hemanta Biswal's mail on the forthcoming international symposium on "Digital Libraries: Sustainable Development in Education," to be held at NDLI, IITKh. I am particularly happy to note the emphasis on ACCESSIBLE EDUCATION. India has taken many initiatives in the area of open and accessible education. The NPTEL programme of IITs (in partnership with IISc) is indeed something the nation can be proud of. [IITM and IISc are now offerng online courses open to all without the need to clear JEE]. SWAYAM is another commendable programme. A friend, a renowned physicist, told me the inspiring story about an autorickshaw driver with middle school education becoming a lecturer in a college after learning through open courses available through SWAYAM and completing his class XII, undergraduate and postgraduate studies (over several years). On the other hand, we also see many universities offering correspondence courses and turning out less than satisfactory graduates in large numbers. I am sure the forthcoming conference at IITKh would discuss the issue of quality control in online education. As we are talking about a G20 event, I would like to draw your attention to the work of Commonwealth of Learning, to which many Indians have made stellar contributions. While we are discussing a conference on 'digital libraries,' I wish to alert you to the general feeling that we host too many conferences, talks and webinars but do not match it with commensurate action. Let us take 'digital,' 'equitable,' 'inclusive' and 'open' access to knowledge. I have lost count of the number of events held in recent times in our country and the number of papers and theses written on this theme. What is the reality? According to COKI, only about 30% of India's research output is available as open access. My colleagues and longtime coauthors Muthu Madhan and Subbiah Gunasekaran tell me that India's share in preprint servers such as arXiv, bioRxiv and medRxiv is also much smaller than one would expect. A very large proportion of papers are published in expensive commercial journals, some after the authors/their institutions or funders have paid a huge article publishing charge. And most researchets in India have no access to these journals. Which means most Indian researchers cannot even read these papers, which in the first place came out of research supported by Indian taxpayers. It would be great if this conference comes up with concrete proposals to make knowledge produced in the G20 countries (and the rest of the world) 'born open' and available to all who want to access it. With best wishes, Subbiah Arunachalam -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.