Cabinet approves establishment of National Knowledge Network

The Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure (CCI) today accorded in principle approval for the establishment of the National Knowledge Network (NKN) that will connect all knowledge institutions in the country through a high-speed data communication network.

The project, to be implemented by the National Informatics Centre (NIC), is expected to encourage sharing of knowledge, specialized resources and collaborative research.

The Government’s decision to set up the NKN was announced in 2008-09. An initial amount of Rs.100 crore was allocated to the Department of Information Technology, Ministry of Communications and IT for the purpose and a high level committee was also set up to coordinate and monitor the project.

An official press release said the architecture of the NKN would be scalable and the network would consist of an ultra-high speed core (multiples of 10Gbps and upwards). The core shall be complemented with a distribution layer at appropriate speeds. The participating institutions can connect to the NKN at speeds of 1 Gbps or to the distribution layer through a last mile connectivity bandwidth.

The NKN will provide a nation-wide ultra high-speed backbone/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 NKN will have about 25 core Points of Presence (PoPs) and 600 secondary PoPs. It will connect around 1500 institutions. The physical infrastructure (setting up of core network) is expected to be completed in 24 months.

According to the release, the NKN will enable scientists, researchers and students from diverse spheres across the country to work together for advancing human development in critical and emerging areas.

It is expected to catalyse knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer between stakeholders seamlessly across the nation and globally.

The NKN is also expected to encourage a larger section of research and educational institutions to create intellectual property. It will enable use of specialized applications, which 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. Applications such as countrywide classrooms will address the issue of faculty shortage and ensure quality education delivery across the country.

In the initial phase of the project, a core backbone consisting of 15 PoPs have been established with 2.5 Gbps capacity. Around 40 institutions of higher learning and advanced research have already been connected to the network and six virtual classrooms set up, the release added.

NNN