Google helps promote Indian language Net, joins alliance of media players

05th November 2014
Google helps promote Indian language Net, joins alliance of media players
From left: Amit Singhal, Senior Vice President, Google; IndianMinister for Information and Broadcast Prakash Javadekar; Rajan Anandan, MD, Google India and Sandeep Menon, Director Marketing, Google India

Delhi, November 5, 2014: Google has helped create an  Indian Language Internet Alliance (ILIA), a group committed to promoting the growth of Indic-language content online by enabling  300 million Indian language speakers to become highly engaged Internet users by 2017.
The ILIA is composed of ABP News, Amar Ujala Publications Ltd, C-DAC, DB Digital, Firstouch, HinKhoj, Jagran Prakashan Limited, LinguaNext Technologies Pvt. Ltd, NDTV, Network 18, Oneindia.com, Patrika Group, Process Nine Technologies Pvt Ltd, Prost Innovation Pvt Ltd, Reverie Language Technologies Private Limited, Times Internet Limited, Ver Se Innovation/NewsHunt, Webdunia.com in addition to Google. The Alliance will work together to accelerate building Indic language content for the hundreds of millions of Indians who will be coming online for the very first time, mostly via smartphones and mobile devices.
Google is  also committed to building the Indian language web by making products for Indic language speakers.  It has enabled  Voice Search in Hindi and has also launched a website called www.hindiweb.com, for Hindi speaking Internet users to discover the best Hindi content across websites, apps, videos and blogs.
Says Amit Singhal, Google’s Senior Vice President of Search:“Our mission at Google is to ensure the world’s information is universally accessible, and this includes the millions of users in India who are about to come online for the first time. Hindi Voice Search will be just one of the many steps Google is taking to empower the Indian language users and advertisers to take advantage of the Web’s huge economic and social potential.”
There are over 200 million Internet users in India, about 16% of its population of 1.2 billion. Practically all of the country’s English-speaking population of 198 million is already online. The remaining 90% of Indians who are not online tend not to be English speakers.