What can hold back India from exploiting the full potential of a digital age? A smartphone priced not higher than $30, or about Rs 2,000. This, along with connectivity in rural areas, ability to use the internet in local languages and bringing women folk on board are the key requirements, believes Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
“We would love to see cheaper entry-level smartphones. They are bringing prices down even more to about $30. If you really want to make a difference in India, you have to be in as many languages as possible as English is spoken only by a very few. So we are trying to make Google work in other languages and we are making progress. There is a massive gender gap when it comes to women getting access to internet. So we are teaching rural women how to use smartphones to access the internet. We are also trying to put local businesses online,” Pichai said while addressing students of Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur, his alma mater.
Google is working closely with the Indian government towards this target to improve connectivity.
Apart from its work with RailTel to provide railway station with WiFi connectivity, Google is working on forging PPPs.
“You can do very effective public-private partnership, a model which doesn’t work effectively everywhere as a model. We are a big supporter of Digital India programme and looking to partner. If you look at Aadhar and UPI, we partner with NPCI and we are working on digitising payments. We intend to form partnerships which we believe would work very well.”
As for India’s role in the global startup universe, Pichai believes the country would have a prominent role within next few years.
“With full certainty, I can say that India would be a global player in the digital economy and as competitive as any country in the world. Start-ups in India are world class in the way they approach things. The country would need few more years to get there.”
Before Stanford University for studying material sciences and engineering and Wharton for MBA, IITK helped Pichai to see the world beyond Chennai, learn to speak Hindi.
