Just as she was about to celebrate, a notification popped up: “New version of Water Supply Engineering by S. K. Garg (2020) now available.” The new edition was not open access; it was listed under a commercial vendor. Maya realized that the most recent updates—perhaps new design codes, recent case studies, and the latest software integration tips—were in that edition.

He handed her a flyer that listed a few reputable OER repositories: the National Digital Library of India, the UNESCO Open Access Repository, and the Indian Institute of Technology’s e‑Print Archive. Maya thanked him and hurried to her laptop. On the National Digital Library, she typed the title and filtered for “Open Access.” A result appeared: “Water Supply Engineering – Revised Edition (2012) – Open Access.” The thumbnail showed the same cover, but the details indicated it was a revised edition released under a Creative Commons license. Maya clicked, and a full PDF opened instantly. The first pages thanked the author for making the book freely available for educational purposes.

When Maya first walked into the dusty second‑hand bookshop on the edge of the old university campus, she didn’t expect to find a mystery waiting between the cracked spines of forgotten textbooks. She was a third‑year civil‑engineering student with a single, burning ambition: to design a water‑distribution system that could keep her hometown of Verdant Springs flowing even during the harshest droughts.

She applied the hydraulic gradient method she’d studied, calculating the required pipe diameters to maintain a minimum pressure of 30 psi at the farthest household. Then she turned to the pump‑selection chapter, modeling various pump curves in EPANET to determine the most efficient configuration for peak demand periods.