India's NKN, Sri Lanka's LEARN connect with high capacity Net

India's National Knowledge Network and Sri Lanka's LEARN which connect to educational institutions between the two countries have now been linked with each other through high capacity internet, the government said today.
Law and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, who is on an official visit to Sri Lanka, inaugurated the connectivity between the two networks.
"On the first day of his visit, he (Prasad) inaugurated the gigabit connectivity between the National Knowledge Network of India and LEARN network of Sri Lanka. This dedicated high speed internet connectivity will boost the collaboration among the academic institutions of India and Sri Lanka," an official statement said.

Sri Lankan Minister for Telecommunications and Digital Infrastructure Harin Fernando was also present on this occasion.
"Both countries signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for enhancing cooperation between India and Sri Lanka in the IT sector, cyber security and eGovernance. On this occasion, the Minister also inaugurated the use of eOffice software developed by National Informatics Center (NIC) by the government of Sri Lanka," the statement said.
NKN aims to connect all universities, research institutions, libraries, laboratories, healthcare and agricultural institutions across the country to improve access to knowledge and meet communication and computational need of the institutions.

NKN has already connected over 1,648 institutions under various categories throughout the country.

Similarly Lanka Education And Research Network (LEARN) also connects leading educational institution in Sri Lanka.
Prasad later called on Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.
He shared the success of UMANG app which was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the presence of Wickremsinghe a few months ago during the inaugural ceremony of Global Conference on Cyber Space in New Delhi.
Prasad invited experts and officers from Sri Lanka to visit India to study some of the eGovernance applications developed by the National Informatics Centre.
He delivered the Lakshman Kadirgamar Memorial Lecture 2018 on the invitation of the Foreign Ministry of Sri Lanka where he spoke on the Evolution of India's Constitutional Democracy, the statement said.