Why are most Indian books so poorly indexed? Is it because we have poor professional indexers? But is it possible for any indexer to handle a range of books from science, technology and medicine to literary criticism, philosophy, economics, law, sociology and history? The real fault lies, as many professional indexers and publishers concede, with the author who is the best person to compile an index. For any work worthy of an index the labour can be hard and long and it really takes a dedicated author to go back to his own work, sentence by sentence, to wrinkle out all the references that might be of value to readers. Most Indian authors fail to put in the last bit and leave it to the professional indexer ? with fatal consequences. What is a good index and what are the practical steps required to produce it? According to Douglas Mathews, whose indexing triumphs include the Alan Clarke Diaries and an English translation of Mein Kampf, the function of an index is not to be a precis or abstract of a book, but to signpost particulars within the text, concisely, precisely and accurately. It points out where to look for all the names, terms and topics of relevance by listing them, usually alphabetically, wherever they occur within the book, and then by referring to a page or column number, though sometimes even more precisely to a defined position on a page, or to a paragraph number The question that often arises in the preparation of an index is how many entries and cross references to put in. Some readers use indexes only occasionally, simply looking for a simple entry, or going directly to the specified page to begin their reading. Others may be more rigorous, noting several entries, following them up with cross references.The way the book and its index are to be used must influence the choice of entries. Or put differently, the entries must be chosen keeping the market in mind and this the author knows best. The complexity and language level of the index should match those of the book which can only be done by the author who has worked on the text keeping his readers in mind. No professional indexer can match the linguistic levels with the main text which is one of the key factors for the success or failure of a book. Above all, it is the author alone who knows whether a book needs an index and what level of detail the reader would want from it. Most books have only one index; few though have one or more special indexes, each dealing with some principal aspect of the book. Thus a history book for schools might list the names of people mentioned and a book of war a simple index of battles. Legal texts almost always have a separate index of cases, while a poetry anthology would index poems by their first lines. Only the author knows; the indexer or the editor can?t know all the ins and outs of the text. Once the author understands the limitations of the indexer, the modus operandi is simple. The author is provided with a set of page proofs and asked to underline all the entries that should be included in the index along with the cross references, if any. The underlined text with the selected entries is then handed over to the professional indexer who knocks them into shape by structuring and wording the entries in a systematic and consistent manner. What is important to keep in mind is that a good index is not just the terms, events and people in the book but the concepts, ideas and relationships: the latter is an intellectual exercise that authors can handle, indexers can?t.