Sundar Pichai, the Indian-origin CEO of Google, held a virtual meet with Prime Minister Modi on Monday morning, where he unveiled the ‘Google for India Digitization Fund’, worth ₹75,000 crores, or an approximate $10 billion. He added that this was in line with the PM’s Digital India initiative. “We’ll do this through a mix of equity investments, partnerships, and operational, infrastructure, and ecosystem investments. This is a reflection of our confidence in the future of India and its digital economy,” he said via video conference at the company’s annual event focused on India.
He emphasized on how technologies like Google Pay were instrumental in shaping India’s economy, especially during this COVID-19 pandemic period.
Here are the key highlights of the meet as well as an account of the investments.
The investments are to be based on 4 key areas, and the primary focus is to be on education technologies, agriculture-specific AI applications, and technological implementations.
- The first goal is to provide affordable education and an ‘information-for-all’ access, in the vernacular languages of Tamil, Hindi, Punjabi, etc.
- Secondly, Google aims to provide services and products that are tailored to cater to the specific needs of a country like India.
- The third is to empower small businesses towards enhancing their presence in the digital marketplace. Google already has a small business-specific Grow With Google venture, designed specifically for small businesses to use internet tools without making massive investments in technological infrastructure.
- Finally, expanding new-age technologies like AI towards fields like healthcare, education, and agriculture.
India is one of the biggest markets of Google and is perceived to be untapped potential for global giants like Google.
(Source: Tech Crunch)