India switches on knowledge grid

17: India launched the world’s first nationwide information highway inter-linking top educational institutions and research laboratories earlier this week, quietly ushering in a new mode of education-sharing with the flick of a digital switch.

The National Knowledge Network (NKN) is up and running, allowing students in India the opportunity to attend live classes of their choice at educational institutions across the country.

First proposed by the National Knowledge Commission in 2006, the NKN will soon be formally unveiled to the nation through a public launch, government officials said.

“But the NKN has been already switched on earlier this week... and it is fascinating,” said an official who witnessed a select demonstration at the Prime Minister’s Office.

The only other knowledge network of comparable size in the world is run by the California Institute of Technology and connects universities, laboratories and even schools across the state of California. The team of experts that erected the NKN had visited California to study their network.

The seven older Indian Institutes of Technology, the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre and two laboratories of the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research have been connected through the NKN so far.

But the plan, the official said, is to link over 10,000 higher education institutions within two years.

“Ultimately, the aim is to link all schools across India to the NKN,” said an official in the ministry of information and communications who has been closely involved with the project.

The NKN runs out of a highway of thousands of kilometres of underground cables that connect key cities and education hubs.

Nodes are placed on the highway to allow information to be extracted from the cables.

Multiple institutions can link up to each node to share, via the highway, knowledge with others connected through the cables — live.

The NKN allows around 2,500,000,000 bits of information flow per second — 2.5 gigabits/s. This bandwidth is nearly a million times higher than what is available for the Garuda, the most advanced information highway available in the country at present, which links up scientific research organisations.

“The highway is wide precisely because, unlike all previous attempts at information link-ups here, the NKN seeks to connect all educational and research institutions.

“That means heavy traffic once the highway becomes popular,” the information and communications ministry official said.

Officials at the human resource development ministry are hoping the NKN will help them ease problems of teacher shortage, one of the biggest challenges that Indian higher education faces.

Over the past year alone, India has set up six new IITs that are being mentored by existing IITs.

Teachers from existing IITs have been travelling to the newer institutions to take classes in the absence of adequate faculty hired for the new technology schools.

For instance, teachers at IIT Madras often have to take classes in Chennai in the morning, then fly to Hyderabad to teach there, and fly back for class in Chennai the next morning. Now, with the NKN, these teachers will be able to take classes at the mentored institute from the parent organisation.

The transmission will be far superior to the quality witnessed in video conferences, the ministry official said.

In ordinary video conferences, the reception often gets distorted if the filmed person moves around.

The NKN has, however, been built to ensure there is no distortion if either the teacher or students move, the official said.

“The reception, I promise you, is so good that the person you speak with will appear physically in front of you to an extent where you might almost find yourself offering him a cup of coffee,” the official said.
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