Abdul Kalam

Mumbai: India must aim at enhancing bandwidth immediately, and "as a nation, we must get 1 gigabit per second connectivity," President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam said here on Friday.

He was delivering the valedictory address at the 6th International Conference on Computing in High-Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP06) at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR).

President's vision

Addressing some of India's leading scientists, he said, "I have a vision that bandwidth should be free and made available to all those who need it." Calling on the Government to take the lead in making it available, he dwelt at length on equitable access to education and knowledge in the digital era.

Describing it as the "primary goal" of virtual universities, he said availability of high bandwidth would ensure that the best resources were accessible to all participants.

"Bandwidth is the demolisher of imbalances and a great leveller in the knowledge society."

Enthusiastic response

Mr. Kalam's address, which detailed the importance of networking and grid computing for scientific research as well as for educational purposes and knowledge acquisition, met with an enthusiastic response from both Indian and foreign listeners.

Important for education

Prof. Harvey Newman, a leading figure in research networking in the United States, said it was important to quantify the President's vision. Mr. Kalam's vision of the knowledge grid was a great technical challenge and would require terabytes per second connectivity to implement. It was a programme which, if implemented, would change the way people thought about networks and grids and the way they interacted with each other.

Prof. Shobo Bhattacharya, Director, TIFR, said the President's vision was important in a country where high-quality human resources in education were scarce.

Institutions such as the TIFR could contribute considerably to education if high-bandwidth networking were available.

Hails physicists works

Mr. Kalam praised the work of Indian high-energy physicists and welcomed their scientific collaboration with the European Centre for High Energy Physics (CERN).

After the valedictory function, he viewed the demonstrations set up to illustrate various high-bandwidth networking applications.

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