The Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure has approved the establishment of the National Knowledge Network (NKN) at an outlay of Rs.5990 crore to be implemented by NIC over a period of 10 years.

The NKN when established will enable scientists, researchers and students in knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer. It would enable use of specialized applications, which allow sharing of high performance computing facilities like 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.

The architecture of the National Knowledge Network will be scalable and the network will consist of an ultra-high speed core (multiples of 10 Gbps and upwards) and will connect around 1500 institutions.

Around 40 institutions of higher learning and advanced research have already been connected to the network and 6 virtual classrooms have already been set up.

Establishment of NKN was one of the recommendations of the National Knowledge Commission (NKC) and announcement for establishing it was made in the budget speech of 2008-09 by Finance Minister. A high level committee was set up under the Chairmanship of Dr. R. Chidambaram, Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India, to coordinate and monitor the establishment of the NKN.