Google to invest 10 Billion in India's digitisation: Sundar Pichai after meeting Modi

Washington, DC: After meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Washington, DC on Friday, Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google is investing USD 10 billion in India's digitisation fund, adding that PM Modi's vision for Digital India serves as a blueprint for other countries.

Pichai after meeting PM Modi, said, "It was an honour to meet PM Modi during the historic visit to the US. We shared with the Prime Minister that Google is investing USD 10 billion in India's digitisation fund."

Pichai further added, "We are excited today that we are announcing the opening up of our global fintech operation centre in GIFT city Gujarat."

Notably, Gujarat International Finance Tec-City is a central business district under construction in Gandhinagar district in Gujarat, India. "PM's vision for Digital India was way ahead of his time I now see it as a blueprint that other countries are looking to do," Pichai said after meeting Prime Minister Modi.

Pichai, who joined Google in 2004, became the CEO of the company in 2015. PM Modi had congratulated him on his appointment as CEO.

Sundar Pichai met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi in December last year and said it is inspiring to see the rapid pace of technological change under his leadership. Pichai, CEO, Google and Alphabet, said he looked forward to continuing strong partnerships and supporting India's G20 presidency to advance open internet that works for all.

During his India visit last year, Pichai also attended the 8th edition of the Google for India event, with Ashwini Vaishnaw, minister for Railways, Communications and Electronics & Information Technology in attendance.

The Google CEO said he is here to see progress being made from our USD 10 billion, 10-year India Digitization Fund (IDF), and share new ways helping to advance India's digital future.

"That includes our efforts to build a single, unified AI model that will be capable of handling over 100 Indian languages across speech and text - part of our global effort to bring the world's 1,000 most-spoken languages online and to help people access knowledge and information in their preferred language. We're also supporting a new, multidisciplinary centre for responsible AI with IIT Madras," said Pichai.

Notably, Project Relate is an app that can understand people with non-binary speech. It can listen, repeat, and understand, and the app is available for Hindi users in early 2023.

"Search result pages will be bilingual in India for those who want and the feature is already available in Hindi. This feature will be supported in languages Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, and Bengali in the coming days. Voice search can now understand people who speak Hinglish better. Using a new neural network model, which takes the person's accent, context, etc into account," he added.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is presently on a State visit to the US met Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and CEOs of Amazon Andrew Jassy and Boeing David L Calhoun in Washington, DC.
Boeing CEO David L Calhoun in an exclusive interview with ANI said, "The most important takeaway is the PM's passion for India's development. He does have a specific interest in aviation, in aerospace. It is a big vision."

He emphasized the importance of India playing a significant role not only for the country but also for the broader region broadly in aviation and aerospace.

Whereas, Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy expressed his commitment to generating additional employment opportunities in India after meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Washington DC.

"Very interested in helping create more jobs, helping digitise more small and medium size businesses and helping more Indian companies and products be able to be exported all around the world," said Jassy.