This feat is the outcome of talks between state chief secretary, P Subrahmaniam and industry secretary, Yashwant Bhave, with Raj Reddy, head of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, professor Arunachalam, former scientific advisor of the government of India and Pradeep Khosala, Centre for Computer Engineering, Pittsburg.

Bhave, who is also accompanying deputy chief minister, Gopinath Munde, to attend the World Energy Conference told The Financial Express on phone from Houston that the proposed IISE will be self-supporting and provide human resource urgently needed in information technology and to boostsoftware exports.

Bhave said that IISE will offer long-term advanced courses and short-term programmes for professionals. The former will have both teaching and advanced research facilities to both professionals and emerging areas of IT that are not adequately represented in Indian industry. These will be increasingly relevant with the availability of year 2000 programme. IISE will also be helpful for the software needed for multimedia applications, education, tele-medicine and the financial sector.

Bhave said software exports were the third largest foreign exchange earners after textiles and jewellery. Now growing at 50 per cent annually, software will soon go to the second slot in the near future.

On the metropolitan data network, Bhave said that the state government will support setting up of 2.5 gigabyte per second high speed metropolitan data network for the Mumbai metropolitan region in a year. This will be done in collaboration with the US-based Inter University Net, a national backbone highspeed data network company being set up in India with the Department of Telecommunications, Indian educational institutes and Carnegie Mellon.

This network will provide access to high speed data needed for multimedia, educational and training applications.

Bhave said that the metropolitan ring will have the potential to connect over 500 financial institutions and other large bandwidth. The data network will have security of information facilities for airline commerical transactions and multimedia services. When complete, the ring would comprise many sub-rings of optical fibre cable over 160 km long.

Advanced optical fibre capable of high speed data transmission will be used for the network which will form an integral part of the national backbone providing access both here and abroad.

IUNET will connect the IITs in Mumbai and Chennai and IIM Bangalore. It will provide an electronic fund transfer facility, interbranch reconciliation, anywhere banking, trading in stocks/securities, etc. It will alsoprovide online transmission to be as reliable as legal contracts on paper. The network will offer digital signature facility and will be staffed for 24 hours and seven days.

Observers say this is a major grab for the state after the decisions by Infosys and Wipro to invest Rs 100 crore and Rs 50 crore respectively in IT for Pune.