Exclusive: Here’s what Google VP Rajan Anandan said about Jio’s Impact on the Telecom Sector

You can only imagine how a work day for Google India head looks like but we can tell you that, he’s now making the most of his commute thanks to better connectivity, more than ever.

Business Insider caught up with Rajan Anandan, VP, Google SE Asia & India to understand how the internet landscape has changed in the past few months.

“India is the biggest market for us and it has a very diverse user base. We are always going to have a clear distinction between India and the US for the next several years,” says Anandan on where India stands for Google.

India currently has around 400 million internet users, 300 million of them are coming online through their smartphone which makes it the second largest internet market in the world after China.

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In the past few months, a lot of things have changed in the internet landscape with low-cost carrier Jio coming in. The Google chief thinks that this has changed things tremendously for the entire telecom sector, “There is now an enormous user base that’s spending its time online, with network providers also upgrading their services and not just giving more for less. Our mission in India is to make information accessible to everyone and that means reaching out to the massive 1.3 Billion population in the country. The Internet for everyone is the goal,” said Anandan.

The first challenge for Google is Access and they’ve tackled that with providing high-speed public Wi-Fi at railway stations and after covering 110 stations, we now have 5 million Indians accessing it every day. With 500, 000 Indians accessing the internet with Google India for the first time, the company plans to extend it to 400 stations by the year 2018.

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With revolutionary projects like Smart Cities, Google is partnering with the government at Pune Smart City to provide high-speed Wi-Fi.
The other concerns are connectivity and affordability and while currently, there at 125 million 4G subscribers and 150 million 3G subscribers, there are still issues like patchy connectivity.

Google is trying to get a lot of its services like YouTube, Maps and even Chrome offline to make the internet more accessible to most Indians. There’s Search Lite which detects how slow is your network and works accordingly.

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“Google is building new products like recently released YouTube Go which are specifically designed for Indians. With only 15 million women villagers online, we are working to bridge the gap with Google Sathi where women teach other how to use the internet for the betterment of their lives,” Rajan says proudly proclaiming that there are 80,000 Google Saathis across 60,000 villages that they’re working in.

The next milestone for this technology behemoth is reaching half of India's villages with Google Saathi and making the internet accessible to the people who need it the most, not just for information but for opportunities to a better connected life.