NEW DELHI: Google has created a new Hindi-language website to add 300 million Indian Internet users by 2017 and bridge the country's linguistic digital divide, the search giant announced Monday.
The website, www.hindiweb.com, is part of Google's push to incorporate more Indian languages into content in the next few years.
Google said nearly all of India's 198 million English speakers are already online.
Now Google is targeting in India the around one billion people who do not speak English, starting with Hindi, the country's most widely spoken language, with some 400 million speakers.
"To reach our goal of 500 million Internet users (from 200 million) by 2017 we need to make the Internet accessible to those who don't speak English," Google India managing director Rajan Anandan told reporters.
The announcement chimes with the goal of the new Indian government of Narendra Modi which has embarked on what it calls a "digital revolution" to bring more Indians online to access government, education and health services and transact more business.
"The web holds great potential to empower many Indians economically and socially, and thanks to the smartphone revolution, many millions of Indians will be coming online for the first time in the next few years," Anandan said.
The Internet initially was mainly the preserve of India's affluent, urban, English-speaking middle-class.
Increasingly affordable smartphones are allowing more Indians to get online but they lack content in their own language. Millions of smartphones are sold in India each month.
"We must build content in people's own languages -- otherwise we'll miss the boat," Anandan said.
Offering local languages would boost India's already exponentially growing online shopping market, for instance, as well as advertising markets, Google executives said.
Hindi and English are both official languages for government business while India's constitution recognises 22 official languages.
The government sees greater use of Internet technology as a means to spur growth in Asia's third-largest-economy where more than 700 million people live on less than $2 a day, according to the World Bank.
Google said it was setting up an Indian Language Internet Alliance -- made up of newspaper, television, web content companies and other players -- to promote growth of local-language Web content.
Google said it aimed to offer web services in at least eight major Indian languages, including Tamil, Bengali and Gujarati, but declined to give a timeline. (AFP)
