By Sundar Pichai



When I was growing up in India, it was hard to get access to a computer. Now hundreds of millions of people have smartphones — powerful devices — all the time. We’re communicating, consuming, educating and entertaining ourselves in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago. And we’re only beginning to understand the full potential of what these devices can do.

Often the best innovations come from the most surprising places. For decades, fishermen of Chennai faced the problem of invisible maritime borders sometimes sparking international incidents and detentions.

Advay Ramesh, a 14-year-old from Chennai, decided to do something about it. He wanted to give those fishermen the same kind of location information he got whenever he checked Google Maps. So he designed a new kind of tablet that would run an application to warn fisherman whenever they strayed past those borders.

An incredibly inventive 14-year old just used technology to provide a potential solution to a problem that had vexed people for decades, proving yet again that great ideas know no borders.

I love seeing innovation like Advay’s coming out of India, especially from students so young. India is becoming an important centre for new technologies — even though less than a third of the population has access to the Internet. Imagine the inventions and progress we will see when everyone has an easy time getting online and getting the information they need.

Google for India

The progress of the last few years has been stunning. Last December, I had the chance to see the progress of Digital India when I met Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Around that same time, at our Google for India event in Delhi, I outlined our goals of bringing more people online. In the last nine months, our teams around the world, and especially in India, have worked hard to make this a reality.

To improve access to the Internet, we have been working with Indian Railways and RailTel on providing Wi-Fi at 400 train stations across the country, with 100 of those by the end of the year. We are already at 50 stations connecting more than 3 million people every month, with more coming online all the time. Additionally, in partnership with Tata Trusts, we’ve brought our Internet Saathi training programme to 10 states, empowering rural women to enhance not just their lives but also drive change in their communities.

For example, Chetna from Alwar district in Rajasthan, learnt about mustard farming techniques at the Internet Saathi programme to improve her earnings and is now a source of inspiration in her community.

And we’ve launched an Android skilling programme, so more Indians can build apps and businesses of the future, and reach billions of people on our open mobile platform. We have also been adapting our own products to better serve the latest wave of Internet users in India.

Mindful of data connectivity and affordability, we launched features such as Maps Offline and YouTube Smart Offline, allowing users to navigate without a data connection or away to download their favourite videos to when data rates are cheaper. We launched a keyboard that makes it easy to input 11 Indian languages, already used by millions of people.

And for search results in Hindi-speaking areas, we give users an ability to switch between English and Hindi on mobile.

There is still much work to be done, and much more to come. Over the last 10 years we’ve invested heavily in machine learning and artificial intelligence to make our products more assistive to people. We-’ve trained our software to recognise words and sentences, and learn what they mean.

Machine Learning

These advances help millions of people ask their devices how much traffic they’ll hit on the way home and then find alternative routes, or the closest restaurant serving their favourite cuisine. Machine learning is helping people in India do voice searches in Hindi, translate phrases from Urdu to Marathi, and find all their photos of T20 matches in Google Photos. Machine-learning technology will be the ‘smarts’ that power the next generation of devices for everyone, in India and beyond.

Over the last year, we have noticed something important about improving our products in India: it makes them better for everyone around the world. In an increasingly mobile-first world, India gives us early insights into the future of the Internet.

Moreover, we learned the issues Indians may have with connectivity, and data constraints can be universal. We dreamed up Maps Offline for India, but people in the United States and Europe are finding it just as useful. Simply put, solving for India is inspiring new Google innovations. Today, at our second edition of Google for India, we will reveal a few major updates to our access programsme, platforms, and products —new things built for and inspired by India that move us a few steps towards the vision of making the benefits of the open Internet available for everyone.

(The writer is CEO, Google)