Google to Open 'Huge New Campus' in Hyderabad: CEO Sundar Pichai

Google will build a new campus at Hyderabad, even as it is working towards including as many people as possible to use the Internet in India, its chief executive, Sundar Pichai, said in New Delhi at the Google for India event on Wednesday.

"In our attempt to provide Internet access to people, we have decided to provide Wi-Fi in 400 railway stations with RailTel. The first 100 stations will come online by 2016 end. Mumbai Central station will be online by January," Pichai said at the event.

This was also a part of the assurance which Google gave to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, when he visited the search engine giant's headquarters at Mountain View, Santa Clara County in California in September this year.

Regarding the company's expansion plans in India, he said: "We will ramp up our engineering investments at our Bangalore and Hyderabad facilities."

"We will also build a huge new campus in Hyderabad," he said, but did not disclose the amount of investment. The company now has 1500 employees in India.

"This country has given me and Google so much and I just hope we can give much more to the country," he said, adding: "A lot of what today is about is how we build products for the next billion Indian users, yet to come online."

Pichai at the Google for India event laid out Google's three-step approach to promoting the Internet in India. The first was the aim to give people in India and other developing countries better access to the full Internet through better connectivity and high-quality software. The second is to make Google products work better for Indians. Third, Google wants to make it easier for Indians to build on top of Google's global platforms like Android and Chrome to build solutions to local problems.

Google also announced a program to train two million new Android developers over the next three years, and said it will work with more than 30 universities across the country in partnership with the National Skill Development Corporation.

Written with inputs from IANS