The government on Thursday approved a project to connect 1500 educational institutes across the country through high speed data communication network. A meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Infrastructure, chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, approved the establishment of the National Knowledge Network (NKN) at an outlay of 5,990 crore rupees to be implemented by the National Informatics Centre over a period of 10 years.<br/><br/>An official spokesperson said that the NKN will have about 25 core Point of Presence (PoPs) and 600 secondary PoPs. It will connect around 1500 institutions. The setting up of core network is expected to be completed in a span of 24 months. AIR correspondent says that the CCI had given its in-principle approval to the project in January which is one of the recommendations of the National Knowledge Commission (NKC).<br/><br/>The network is expected to encourage sharing of knowledge, specialised resources and collaborative research. The NKN was announced by the then Finance Minister P Chidambaram in his Budget speech of 2008-09.