National Knowledge Network To Link 15000 Colleges

THE Union Cabinet is on its agenda the launching of the Rs 5,000-crore ‘National Mission in Education in ICT’ project, which envisages the creation of a National Knowledge Network across institutes through a 15 Gigabit broadband connectivity.

A key recommendation of the Sam Pitroda-led National Knowledge Commission (NKC), this project first mooted in 2007 envisages networking across some 15,000 colleges and universities, putting learning material online and sharing the expertise of centres of excellence with institutes spread across the country. With the Cabinet nod for the project, this will be one of the few NKC proposals which has found favour with the Arjun Singh led-HRD Ministry.

The Ministry will be tying up with the Department of Telecom for creation of a countrywide broadband access network by utilising its existing optical fibre network. The Mission is expected to cover some 18,000 colleges eventually and make available facilities like e-books and e-journals in digital libraries. The NKC has reportedly asked the states to ensure that educational institutes under them are equipped to hook on to the high-speed, high capacity broadband network in a phased manner. The HRD ministry is also learnt to have allocated Rs 100 crore for the Mission in 2008-09 itself. The immediate objective of the network will be to share the existing content, coursework, expertise, ideas, innovations, equipment and facilities available in the limited number of centres of excellence, with a wider group of institutions, educators and students. The purpose of such a knowledge network is to build quality institutions with state-of-the-art research facilities which in turn will help create a pool of a highly trained workforce.