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Sundar Pichai who is the CEO of Google and Alphabet has announced that Google will invest 10 billion dollars to India Digitization Fund in the next five to seven years.

On Monday the CEO of Google and its Parent company Alphabet, Sundar Pichai has announced that Google would invest nearly 10 billion dollars for the digitsation of the country in the next couple of years. This investment will be divided into few parts and would be a mix of equity investments, operational investments, ecosystem investments and partnership investments. Sundar Pichai also mentioned in the virtual conference that this investment is the confidence Google has in the future of India and its digital economy.

The funds are going to focus on four areas that are important and primary to India's Digitisation.

These four areas include technology, education, health and agriculture. In these four areas the Digitisation will enable affordable access to internet and will provide information to eve individual in India in their language of choice. This digitsation will also help I building new products for our unique needs.

The Google for India Digitisation Fund will also focus on empowering businesses especially small and medium businesses as they continue or embark on their digital transformation.Recently Mastercard also invested in India to support small and medium scale enterprises.

The Google for India Digitisation Fund will also focus on leveraging technology and Artificial Intelligence. This will be mainly for social good, including digital literacy, outbreak predictions, and support for rural economies.

Startups are the growing structure of the Indian economy and at the event India’s Union IT Minister also mentioned that with this fund Google will focus on promoting and investing in startups. "There is immense scope for Google to deploy artificial intelligence and undertake new initiatives in the field of agriculture, weather prediction, healthcare in the wake of Covid-19 challenges and most importantly in digital education," Prasad said. He also mentioned that the technology and software economy in India is growing rapidly and that India also needs to upload and invent apps rather than just download it. Caesar Sengupta who is the General Manager and Vice President of Payments at Google has also mentioned I the meeting that during this time of pandemic every India business should digitalize itself.

Google also announced new initiatives as part of its ongoing efforts towards the response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

He announced a new initiative with Prasar Bharati, launching an edutainment series on Doordarshan on how small businesses can adopt digital tools and adapt to the current situation, using examples of real life Indian businesses.

Google Pay or Gpay which is a payments service and allows digital transactions of payment also adopted a new platform called Spot Platform. This platform was introduced in March on the Google pay application. This platform helps in improving offline merchant discoverability and helps people to find shops near them to see what essential food items are in stock. This platform has been used by more than 2 million users..

The spot platform also has a Job Spot feature to support people who are looking for work.The Job Spot on Google Pay, now allows for remote interviews and remote work listings so that people who are unemployed can secure employment and income more quickly during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Google also announced a partnership with CBSE which is acentral based school education system to train over one million teachers in 22,000 schools across India by the end of 2020 ths partnership will help to deliver blended learning that combines the classroom approach with online learning, using free tools like G Suite for Education, Google Classroom, YouTube and more.

To support underserved low-income communities, Sapna Chadha who is the Senior Country Marketing Director, Southeast Asia & India has also announced a new Google.org grant of $1 million to Kaivalya Education Foundation (KEF) as part of the Global Distance Learning Fund.Using these funds, the KEF will work with the Central Square Foundation and TeacherApp to train 700,000 teachers to deliver virtual education for students so that they can continue learning at home over mass media such as TV and radio, wherever smartphones or internet access are not available. Most of the rural areas which account for more than 50% of students’ education has no access to internet.

At the event, Google also shared updates on the work it has been doing since the start of the Covid-19 outbreak in India.Google said it has seen over two billion searches on Covid, across different languages on Google platforms in the last two months.

The Google CEO, Sundar Pichai who is of India origin from Chennai a southern State in India, on Monday also interacted with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on a wide range of subjects, particularly leveraging the power of technology to transform the lives of India's farmers, youngsters and entrepreneurs.In the virtual meeting with Pichai, the Prime Minister also discussed the new domestic work culture that is emerging during the coronavirus crisis.

By Deepika Agarwal