Google to promote Indian languages

New Delhi : Ensuring greater reach of internet in the country, Google Monday announced alliance with industry partners to form the Indian Language Internet Alliance (ILIA), a group committed to promote the growth of Indic-language content online.

This will facilitate India to reach the coveted 500 million internet users mark by 2017, Google India vice president and managing director Rajan Anandan said here.

Google also launched a website called www.hindiweb.com, a platform for Hindi speaking internet users to discover the best Hindi content across websites, apps, videos and blogs.

India now has over 200 million internet users and to reach the desired 500-million mark, Hindi language tools will help a lot.

Anandan said the success will be based on four pillars - access, discovering ability, content and innovations.

Google has tied up with 15 partners to take the Indian language mission forward, but later on the number of partners will increase.

The search engine giant will also look into other languages like Tamil, Marathi, and Bengali, said Amit Singhal, senior vice president.

"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," he said.

"This alliance will help the country reach the 300 million internet users target by 2017. Internet is mostly in English," Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar said. He also stressed on the need for making internet available in Hindi for the people.

"Indians are best at adaptation but the technology has to be user friendly," the minister said, adding this alliance will further the cause of Digital India envisaged by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government.