India has been gaining a lot of attention from tech giants like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Ma, Satya Nadella and now Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai. Pichai is visiting India and this will be his first overseas trip after taking over as the head of one of the world’s largest search giants.
“India is a key driver to Google’s growth. And with the potential here, Google Capital will invest $20 million for Indian startups to support crowd computing,” said Pichai.
During his two-day visit, Pichai will meet President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
“Our focus is on bringing internet access to everyone, making sure our products are working for them in a meaningful way and then ensure our platform allows them to add their voice to the Internet,” he added, “Google is looking at hiring people for Bangalore and Hyderabad… We will also build a huge new campus in Hyderabad.”
Google had announced that it will collaborate with the Indian Railways to provide 400 Google powered public wi-fi services by the end of next year. This service is currently in testing at Mumbai Central Railway station and will go live from January 2016. Till now there are no plans to monetise it. He had also announced that Google will enable users to type in 11 Indian languages on the Android platform.
The 43 year old, IIT Kharagpur pass out, had earlier met Modi in September during the Prime Minister’s visit to the Silicon Valley in September and will meet students of Shri Ram College of Commerce for a chat session on 17 December. He will also be meeting Google executives, media, developers, entrepreneurs and marketers during his stay in India.
Also a part of the Google CEO’s visit to India, would be to have talks and discussions with prominent industry leaders and the government. These include discussions with Communications and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, to further discuss the PM’s Digital India initiatives, Japanese tech giant, Hitachi’s executive officer Yutaka Saito, Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy and Wipro chairman Azim Premji, from what we know so far.