'We want Indians to shape the Internet'

Prasanna D Zore/Rediff.com reports from the Google For India event in New Delhi.

India is fast emerging as a hotspot in not only Google’s thirst to find more users who could use its bread-and-butter search engine, and, in turn, generate more revenues for the company, but also develop world-class products and take them to the global stage.

Speaker after speaker -- from Google Inc CEO Sundar Pichai to Rajan Anandan, VP & MD, Google South East Asia and India, to six other vice presidents -- who spoke at the Google For India event at Delhi, December 16, re-emphasised and reiterated their commitment to India.  

Everybody spoke about finding the next billion users, the New Internet User and everybody emphasised India’s importance for Google in this search for the Next Billion Users. 

Dressed nattily in a grey shirt and a pair of black trousers, Pichai, who joined the Mountain View, California-based search company in 2004, the same year the company went public, and rose to become its CEO in just 10 years, looked every bit a college-going teenager as he delivered a 20-minute keynote address outlining Google’s efforts in India to improve access in India’s rural hinterland using Project Loon, making search accessible even on 2G connections and create a translator that will support as many Indian languages as possible for the Internet to become beneficial to the people of a country as diverse as India.

On Wednesday, the chilly Delhi air was abuzz with rumours of a big announcement from Pichai’s maiden visit to the country of his origin after the Chennai-born, 43-year-old took over the reins of a company that now boasts of market capitalisation of $517 billion and posted earnings of $3.98 billion for the quarter that ended September 2015.

"What we make in India, eventually reaches a global scale. And given that India is at the cutting edge of mobile revolution, we think what we build in India will work in many, many places,"  Pichai, who was on a two-day visit to India, said even as he mentioned YouTube Offline and Map Maker, two made-in-India products that have been deployed on a global scale.

Pichai is in India at a time when Google, having lost an opportunity to expand its base in China because of regulatory hurdles there, is searching for its next billion new users and perhaps betting big on India’s fast-growing smartphone population that uses the Google OS, Android.

In its bid to spread its net far and wide, Google has also lined up an ambitious programme with the help of Indian Railways‘ RailTel to provide 400 railway stations with high-speed, free, Wi-Fi connectivity by the end of 2016.

The programme, which will be rolled out with Mumbai Central station becoming the first to experience high-speed, free, Wi-Fi in January 2016, is likely to provide access to 10 million Indians by December next year.

In fact, as Pichai said in his keynote address, Google has also joined hands with the National Skill Development Council to train two million Android developers in the next three years.

The race for getting the eyeballs of mobile users with its Android platform is driven by the fact that by January 2016, users of Google’s Android OS in India are likely to outstrip those in the US.

Gelling smoothly in this speedy expansion of the Google footprint in India is another plan of setting up a huge campus at Hyderabad, expanding its research and development in Bangalore and hiring more engineers who will create products in India to be rolled out globally.

“We plan to revolutionise the world with solutions born in India,” said Marian Croak, VP, access strategy and emerging markets, further emphasising Pichai’s line of action of making India a Google lab.

“India is a top priority, the core of our mission,” said Caesar Sengupta, VP, product management. 

“We’re hiring in Bangalore and Hyderabad,” he added.

“India is Here and Now. India is Happening Now,” Caesar said, to conclude the two-hour Google for India event.

Earlier, Pichai in his keynote address said, “We just don’t want Indians to consume Internet but add their voice to it, shape it, and contribute back to the Internet.”