Google announces $10 billion investment to digitise India, PM Modi lauds effort

Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Monday introduced that the corporate can be investing practically $10 billion into growing infrastructure and funding digital innovation in India over the following 5 to seven years.

Pichai was talking on the sixth version of Google for India carried out in collaboration with the Ministry of Electronic and Information Technology, the place a number of measures to be undertaken by the tech big equivalent to increasing the scope of digital funds utilizing Google Pay and growing low value smartphones to transition characteristic cellphone customers into smartphone customers have been additionally introduced.

Before Pichai made the bulletins, he additionally had a video-conference with Prime Minister Narendra Modi to debate Google’s concepts for India’s digital future.

“This morning, had an extremely fruitful interaction with @sundarpichai,” PM Modi tweeted.

“We spoke on a wide range of subjects, particularly leveraging the power of technology to transform the lives of India’s farmers, youngsters and entrepreneurs.”

The Prime Minister added that the 2 had additionally mentioned “the new work culture that is emerging in the times of Covid-19”.

“We discussed the challenges the global pandemic has brought to areas such as sports. We also talked about the importance of data security and cyber safety,” PM Modi stated on Twitter.

“I was delighted to know more about the efforts of @Google in several sectors, be it in education, learning, @_DigitalIndia, furthering digital payments and more,” he added.

Digital India has been one of many flagship schemes of the Central authorities. The Indian tech area additional moved in the direction of a ‘Make in India’ strategy final month after the PM introduced the ‘Atmanirbhar app challenge’.

“Google will fund the Digitisation of India initiative with a $10 billion investment over the next 5-7 years in terms of equity, partnerships and infrastructure development,” Pichai stated on Monday. “This is a reflection our confidence in the future of India and its digital economy. We will work towards enabling affordable internet access to every Indian in their own language.”

Pichai added that particular consideration can be paid to growing services and products related to India, empowering small enterprise, and leveraging know-how and synthetic intelligence for areas like well being and agriculture.

“We look forward to working with PM Modi and hope India will lead the next wave innovation,” Pichai stated.

Union minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad added that the digital transformation of India has particularly targeted on ‘digital inclusion’.

“India’s app economy growing very powerfully and it is important not just to download but to upload apps as well,” stated Prasad. “We are working towards developing one lakh digital villages across India and I would appreciate it if Google could pick a cluster of these villages and make them model villages in terms of skilling and delivery of telemedicine,” Prasad added.