Caesar Sengupta is Google Vice President, Next Billion Users and Payments. He spoke to Nalin Mehta about why India is central to the future global growth of the internet and how this is changing the way digital products are being designed.

Globally we have over 4 billion internet users now and another billion coming in, mostly from Asia. How different are internet consumption patterns for these new users compared to those that came before?

Unlike the first billion or so people who came online, the last billion who came online largely in the last three years – primarily from countries like India, Indonesia, Brazil, Nigeria – are very different in one key aspect. You and I probably started our computing journey on laptops and desktops. That was the first computing device we used, but these one billion and the next three billion who will come online will start on a smartphone, and in most cases, just stay on a smartphone.

Their expectations of what a computer is and what the internet is are very different. It can be something as trivial as that when we think of a keyboard, we think by default of a qwerty keyboard. But a lot of these new users are just voice natives. We find in India, in many villages, where we run our ‘Saathi’ programme (to improve digital literacy among rural women), that most of the Saathi users actually tend to interact with their phones primarily through voice. Their expectations are different.

Countries like India have leapfrogged compared to where the US and Western Europe are.

Give us a sense of the fastest growing Indian regional languages on the internet and their patterns of growth?

In India, 95% of video consumption is in regional Indian languages. Voice is emerging as the preferred mode of input for new internet users and India today leads in the total volume of voice searches in the world. We’re seeing 270% year-on-year growth in voice searches in India, as of 2018.

Recent research indicates that Hindi internet users will outnumber English users by 2021. Marathi is the next biggest but Tamil, Telugu and Kannada are showing the biggest internet adoption rates.

You started Google Tez for paments which was then merged into Google Pay. What is the current state of play on digital payments?

We are actually very humbled and surprised by the adoption. When we started, the unified payments interface (UPI) was a very new system and had only existed for about 8 or 9 months. We have been absolutely stunned by how it has expanded. The last number we gave out in February was 45 million users and what was even more surprising was the amount of actual money passing through the system, which at that point was already above $80 billion annualised.

There was a Morgan Stanley report a few months back which said 5-6% of India’s GDP is now moving through UPI. That’s stunning and it’s happened in 18 months.

For us, 70% of our payment users are just outside the top eight Metros, so actually in smaller towns. A large part of our usage, about 30-40%, is between towns.

We have seen what happened in China, when you move from cash to a digital payment system, the kinds and types of commerce that evolve are very unique and different. We are super excited about what is happening in India.

Sundar Pichai in the past has talked about how India is increasingly a place where new projects are first experimented with and then replicated globally, like with Wi-Fi in railways stations. Can you give us more such examples?

We built YouTube offline and Google Maps offline for India a few years back. Very soon we saw huge demand from other countries and now it has been globally rolled out. It’s as useful to you in the Bay area as it is in India. Google Maps offline was a core deep technology problem. It’s a re-architecting of how maps are expressed because there are now roads and paths that can only be taken by a certain type of vehicle.

When we built Files Go, it was a small product because we saw in India and Indonesia people were running out of the space. Surprisingly the US is one of the top countries where it’s being used because needs are fairly uniform across countries. For Wi-Fi in stations, we started with 400 stations in India and now it is deployed in eight countries. India is the biggest deployment but after that it are Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, Philippines and other places.