Google plans to hire more in City

Technology giant Google on Wednesday said it will increase investment in India and hire more people and set up a campus at Hyderabad, as the company is focussing on developing products here.

Google’s India-born chief executive Sunder Pichai told reporters that the company will also increase hiring in Bengaluru. Pichai, on his first official visit to India after taking over in August, also said that the company is working towards connecting India with projects such as public Wi-Fi in partnership with the Railways, besides “Project Loon.”

“100 stations to have Wi-Fi by December 2016. Mumbai Central (station) to go live by January. This is in partnership with RailTel,” said Pichai.

The telecom wing of the Railways, RailTel, had signed an agreement with the subsidiary of Google India to provide Wi-Fi facilities at 400 stations across the country.

“Our focus is on bringing Internet access to everyone, making sure our products are working for them in a meaningful way and then ensure our platform allows them to add their voice to the internet,” he said.

Besides, Google will also expand its rural internet programme for women from pilot to full-scale programme to cover 3 lakh villages in India, he said.

Pichai met Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and IT & Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Wednesday.

Pichai will also meet President Pranab Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi to outline the ways Google is trying to connect those coming online for the first time in the country of more than 1.2 billion people.

Pichai, who is credited with building products such as Google’s Chrome browser and the Chrome operating system, and is known for his keen intellect and modesty, is looking at getting more people to plug into the company’s services, such as search, Gmail and YouTube.

He is also seeking to revive fortunes of Android One Phone that met with a lukewarm response from the Indian market after its launch last year. Pichai said India will overtake the US in terms of users of Android, that competes with Apple’s iOS and Microsoft’s Windows operating systems.