The centre on Thursday approved an investment of Rs 5,990 crore toward setting up

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a national knowledge network (NKN) to encourage information sharing and collaborative research in the country. According to an official statement, the investment will be made over a period of ten years. The establishment of the network was done at a meeting of the cabinet committee on infrastructure headed by prime minister Manmohan Singh.

“The NKN would enable scientists, researchers and students from diverse spheres across the country to work together for advancing human development in critical and emerging areas. The network was expected to encourage a larger section of research and educational institutions to create intellectual property,” the statement said.

The proposal would enable use of specialised applications that allow sharing of high performance computing facilities, e-libraries, virtual classrooms and very large databases. “Health, education, grid computing, agriculture and e-governance are the main applications identified for implementation and delivery on NKN,” it added.

Initially, a core backbone consisting of 15 points of presence (PoPs) has been established with 2.5 gbps capacity. Around 40 institutions of higher learning and advanced research have been connected to the network and six virtual classrooms have been set up. Gradually, NKN will have about 25 core PoPs and 600 secondary PoPs and will connect around 1,500 institutions. The setting up of core network may be done in 24 months. The NKN architecture can be upgraded to an ultra-high speed core. The participating institutions can connect to network at speeds of 1 gbps or to the distribution layer through a last mile connectivity bandwidth.

NKN will provide nation-wide ultra high-speed backbone and data-network highway. Various other networks in the country can take advantage of this ultra high-speed backbone, with national and international reach to create independent and closed user groups.

The government’s decision to set up the national knowledge network was announced by the finance minister in budget speech of 2008-09. An initial amount of Rs 100 crore for FY 2008-09 was allocated to department of information technology, the official statement said. A high level committee was set up under the chairmanship of principal scientific adviser R Chidambaram to coordinate and monitor the establishment of NKN.