KID'S IDEAS PRESENTS
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Today, we are using internet for many reasons. For example, we use it for e-mailing, searching, browsing, downloading, communicating, etc. in our daily life. Do you know that, with more than half a billion internet users, India is one of the biggest and fastest-growing internet economies in the world, second only to China—be it in terms of the number of internet connections or the volume of apps downloaded. How India connected to the internet and celebrate SILVER JUBILEE.
The foundations of the internet in India were laid down just over three decades ago, in 1986, through the Education and Research Network Project. Launched by the Union government with funding from the UN Development Programme, Ernet aided research and development across eight institutions. A decade later, on 14 August 1995, commercial internet services were rolled out by the state-owned Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited. A 15 August headline in The Times Of India read: “Independence Day to mean freedom with the Internet".
Reaching this stage, however, was no easy task. Gopi Garge, who started as a project assistant at Ernet in 1988 and was part of the project till 2012, recalls: “The internet was just sprouting out of labs in the US and a few places in Europe. The idea was to bring this technology and actually set up a network in India." The eight institutions selected for this task were the National Centre for Software Technology in Mumbai—now ….known as the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing—the erstwhile department of electronics in the Union government, the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and five Indian Institutes of Technology (Madras, Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur and Kharagpur).
One of the eight project coordinators was Srinivasan Ramani, who was instrumental in getting the internet to India. In 1983, he had proposed the creation of an Indian academic network. Ramani was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2014, an honorary lifetime achievement award presented by the Internet Society, for his pioneering work.

Garge, explains in a Zoom call from Milton Keynes, UK, that these UUCP systems would dial into each other to send emails and information, “enabling the transfer of files from one system to another". The system at the NCST was called “Shakti" (means power), while the one at IISc was named “Turing", after the renowned British computer scientist Alan Turing. There were similar systems at each institution, enabling the first nationwide email network, he adds. Each centre was known as an “Ernet project node". “In the larger scope of the physical network, they became what we call ‘backbone nodes,’ housed in Network Operations Centres. Ernet had a topology that interconnected all our backbone nodes in the NOCs, where all the regional institutions would connect to. At each of these Ernet nodes, we also had provisions to provide local conne