The Union Cabinet has cleared the Information Technology Ministry's Rs.6,000-crore proposal for setting up a single exclusive portal for linking all universities in the country. The network will be simultaneously connected to all medical and agricultural universities, technical institutions and major libraries, said Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology A. Raja here on Friday.
The Minister said the proposal, known as National Knowledge Network (NKN), had been approved by the Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure, which would provide inter-linking of all knowledge institutions through optical fibre network.
The focus of the scheme was online education, sharing of knowledge, specialised resources and collaborative research.
2012 target met
The Ministry had already achieved providing 600 million telephone connections though the target was set for 2012 only, Mr. Raja said while delivering the graduation day address at College of Engineering, Guindy, Madras Institute of Technology, A.C. College of Technology and School of Architecture and Planning here.
The Minister also distributed degrees to 2,430 graduates and 1,666 post graduates. Fifty-five persons were awarded M.S. by research.
Earlier welcoming the gathering, Anna University Registrar S. Shanmugavel said the university was ranked fifth in the country and it was one of the top 200 universities at the international level.
Major IT institutions were eager to absorb university graduates immediately after they completed their studies, he added.
University Vice-Chancellor P. Mannar Jawahar said the degrees were conferred in the 30th convocation of Anna University held in February.
