Sources told The Financial Express that the Centre has also cleared the formation of Sankhya Vahini India (SVI), a joint venture company with equity participation by the Department of Telecommunications Services (DTS), the US-based Carnegei Mellon University and leading Indian educational institutions.

DTS will pick up 45 per cent equity while Carnegei Mellon and companies supported by it will pick up 49 per cent. The Indian Institute of Information Technology (Hyderabad), Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore) and the six Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) will pick up the rest.

The Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services (IL&FS) has offered to provide 10,000 sq ft initially which will later be increased to 40,000 sq ft on a rentalbasis to Sankhya Vahini India in the Bandra-Kurla complex. The state government will help getting lease rental as an advance from SVI.

Sankhya Vahini India would coordinate the design, create national backbone and set up the urban links. This would require lighting of existing dark fibres, laying new bundles of advanced fibres, enhancing the capacity of existing fibres to larger bandwidths, multiplexing and aggregation to free a few fibres exclusively for the backbone.

The company would also work with educational institutions in India and the US to create and make available the necessary educational and training content to the network.

Mantralaya sources told The Financial Express that the proposed network dedicated exclusively to data communications will form a 10,000-mile national backbone at speeds over 1,000-10,000 times currently available in the country. This backbone will initially connect over 10 metropolitan centres and over 100 universities, colleges and institutions of higher learning.

Thisbackbone with high bandwidth above 2.5 GBPS would meet the data communication needs of other organisations in commercial, financial and manufacturing sectors. In the future, users may possibly include Internet service providers (ISPs). The proposed bandwidths would place India on a par with the US and other advanced technological nations in the world. The bandwidth which would be in multi-gigabits, would be continuously upgraded to stay at the cutting edge of technology.

Moreover, the company would also set up a series of urban data networks linked to the national backbone. This would be implemented by freeing a few existing fibres for this network and by laying additional fibres with enhanced bandwidth capability. The networks would provide scalable high speed connection points and support access to a wide range of end-users.