Within minutes of signing off from his Facebook Townhall Q&A, Prime Minister Narendra Modi reached Google’s Headquarter in California’s Silicon Valley.
PM Modi was given a tour of four critical projects and their value for Digital India by Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai.
Modi also announced that Google will collaborate with the Indian Railways to provide wi-fi services at 500 stations by next year
Modi calls the company ‘Google Guru’, presumably because of the its formidable search engine and its associated services.
Modi, who took a tour of the Google campus saw the latest products and forward-looking researches. He was given a presentation of Google Earth in which the ghats of his Lok Sabha constituency Varanasi were shown.
Later, Prime Minister Modi addressed the ‘Code 4 India’ Hackathon - an overnight Hackathon in support of his flagship initiatives, Digital India and Skills India, involving more than 200 software engineers from the Tech Mahindra office in Noida and 200 engineers at Google’s Mountain View base. Around 24 web and mobile apps were expected from the marathon session.
Key highlights of Prime Minister Modi’s address at the ‘Code 4 India’ Hackathon -
- You have been seeking solutions while sitting on your machines for the past 15 hours.
- I believe this Hackathon culture of seeing solutions to all kinds of problems must be emulated in all the Indian cities. I thank you all.
- Google and Indian Railways, which is the size of a European country, are partnering. 500 railway stations to get wi-fi access soon.
- I can see a change coming through. With my app I am able to connect with so many people and get their feedback.
Meanwhile, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, also addressed the Hackathon -
- We are going to have 11 more languages, including Gujarati, on Android next month.
- We are all united by the belief that technology can help improve our lives.
- When we were working on Google Chrome, we talked about which country would adopt it fastest. And it was India.
Recalling his younger days when he used to travel by train from Chennai to Kharagpur, Pichai noted that 25 million people ride the Indian Railways daily using 7500 stations.
Google will soon help India set up base for free Wi-Fi at 500 railway stations.
Earlier at the Digital India dinner at San Jose on Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, “We are expanding our public wifi hotspots. We want to ensure that free wifi is not only there at airports, but also on our railway platforms.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the prime minister would make the announcement while touring the offices of the internet giant in a few hours.