New Delhi, Dec 16: Google will build a brand new campus at Hyderabad in Telangana state and hire more people, the software giant’s chief executive Sundar Pichai said Wednesday.
He said the American multinational technology company was working towards including as many people as possible in the use of internet in India, and added the company will develop products in India that have global usage.
“In our attempt to provide internet access to people, we have decided to provide Wi-Fi at 400 railway stations in association with RailTel. The first 100 stations will come online by 2016-end. Mumbai Central station will be online by early January,” Pichai said at a ‘Google for India’ event here.
Later in the day, Pichai met Union communications minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, who said Google has reached an in-principle agreement with the Indian government for its research and development project, Loon.
The project is aimed at providing internet connectivity in rural India.
“I have proposed Google to partner with the state-owned telecommunications company BSNL for the pilot project,” Prasad said.
Pichai’s announcements were part of the assurance Google held out to Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to the search engine giant’s headquarters at Mountain View, Santa Clara county, California, in September.
Regarding the company’s expansion plans in India, Pichai said: “We will ramp up our engineering investments at our Bangalore and Hyderabad facilities. We will also build a huge new campus in Hyderabad.”
This is Chennai-born Pichai’s first visit to India after he became the CEO of the restructured Google in August.
Pichai pointed out how women are lagging behind in Internet use in India and underlined how it is important for a sizeable number of women to have access to it. Agencies
