Funds will be used to provide broadband connectivity in villages, connect colleges over three years
Prashant K. Nanda
New Delhi: India will spend R 1 trillion over the next three years to “democratize information” through projects such as the National Knowledge Network (NKN) and the gram panchayat (village councils) network, Sam Pitroda, adviser to the Prime Minister on public information, infrastructure and innovation, said on Thursday.
Pitroda, also a member of the National Innovation Council (NInC), said though the budget for NKN is now Rs. 6,000 crore, it could increase by some 65%. “We will probably end up spending some Rs. 10,000 crore by the time the project is completed.”
NKN aims to connect the top universities, science research institutes, central institutions like the Indian Institutes of Technology, and research labs through fibre optics, to promote research in the country. It will be a multi-gigabit pan-India network providing a unified highspeed network backbone for all knowledge-related institutes in the country.
Of the targeted 1,500 institutes, NKN has so far connected 693; the rest will be connected before the end of 2012.
“Multi-disciplinary research needs immersive interaction and NKN is facilitating it,” Pitroda said at a select press briefing to give a lowdown on the progress on NKN. “What we are doing now is putting an infrastructure of infrastructure that will drive the growth of India in the coming years.”
NKN will later connect with Edusat (education satellite launched by the Indian Space Research Organization) and foreign research labs to allow people from diverse background to come together, he added. “If you put together all such projects, including UID (unique identity project), then the total investment will be around Rs. 100,000 crore in three years.”
Providing broadband connectivity to all village panchayats alone, which is overseen by NInC, will need some Rs. 25,000 crore, Pitroda said.
All meteorological organizations and related institutions, including the India Meteorological Department in Delhi, the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, and the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services in Hyderabad are now interconnected under NKN for grid computing on climate change, said R. Chidambaram, scientific adviser to the government.
The National Brain Research Centre and Canada’s McGill University too are working together on a project, he said.
“It (NKN) is facilitating academia-industry interaction, remote access to advance facilities, rural tech delivery, and research collaboration,” Chidambaram explained.
S.V. Raghavan, scientific secretary to the government, said NKN, once fully rolled out, will allow for virtual classrooms, countrywide classrooms and sharing of faculty among institutions. The Meta University that the government wants to set up will be based on the NKN backbone, he added.
Meta University, through which students can take up more than one course at a time and study from different universities, will not be a physical infrastructure.
It will be a network based model, said R. Gopalkrishnan, member secretary of NInC. “It will start operation from the 2012 academic session and the details will be fleshed out within a couple of months. We think top-grade universities should be allowed to come together to start this.”
On the challenges to NKN, Pitroda said while the network will provide connectivity, “the need is for content, Indian (local language) content and new applications. We have to see how we can use it to promote vocational education.”
But primarily, Pitroda added, there has to be a “change of mindset at the students’, teachers’ and researchers’ level.”
prashant.n@livemint.com
