THE
CAMPUS-WIDE NETWORK
The
setting up of the University Computer Network was
initiated by a grant of Rs. 3.85 crore from the
Department of Information Technology of the Ministry of
Communications and Information Technology, as part of the
Gyan Vahini project of e-enabling Universities. A
gigabit fibre-optic backbone was laid in the two campuses
of the University. The whole project involves about 44 km
of fibre-optic cabling and around 200 km of enhanced Cat5
UTP cabling. There is provision for 3200 nodes, stretched
across nearly 80 buildings, covering all departments,
centres and administrative units of the University, 13
campus colleges and 16 on-campus hostels. The project was
executed by ERNET India on a turnkey basis and the network
was inaugurated in December 2003.
The
network has subsequently been upgraded with the help of an
additional grant of Rs. 2 crore from the Ministry of Human
Resources Development. The reach of the network has been
extended, the North and South campuses have been connected
directly by a dedicated wireless link, and a trial project
of bringing off-campus Colleges on the network through
wireless has been initiated.
Services
available to users include access to the Internet through
6 Mbps (shared) bandwidth to the two campuses. As far as
possible, every faculty member, official and research
scholar has an individual electronic mailbox that can be
accessed remotely. The University on its own subscribes to
a number of electronic journals and with the coming of the
UGC-Infonet-Infiibnet consortium, electronic subscriptions
to a collection of the world's most prestigious journals
has become accessible to users throughout the University.
The
Campus-wide Intranet, with transmission speeds of the
order of Gbps, provides genuine broadband connectivity
within the University. In time it is expected that the use
of the Network will grow. The digitisation of library
catalogues is currently underway. It is expected that soon
all processes in the Delhi University Library System will
be e-enabled and that we shall have an electronic
repository of PhD theses. A project for the process
automation of the Examination Branch has been initiated.
This will also serve as a test case for automating
processes in Administration and Finance.
Of course, the long-term goal is that the network becomes
an educational resource. Implementation of e-courses,
self-paced multimedia educational learning modules,
on-line interaction between teachers and students are all
distinct possibilities. Once mindsets being to change, new
directions as yet un though t-of may emerge from the
collective application of the minds of the largest
university community in India. The network will ensure
that, whatever the obstacles to this enterprise, they will
not be those of technology.