Telangana State IT Minister K T Ramarao has stated that IT major Google has agreed to invest Rs 1,000 crore in Hyderabad in the coming four years.
On Tuesday, the Google company signed an MoU with the Telangana State to set up its campus in Hyderabad and is supposed to start before the summer of 2019. The minister and IT department secretary Jayesh Ranjan visited the Google’s head office at Mounten View in the USA today. Speaking on the occasion, Google vice-president David Radkliff, Jayesh Ranjan inked the agreement. The Google will establish its campus in two million sft area at a cost of Rs 1,000 crores.
As per the MoU, Google is allocated 7.2 acres in Gachibowli, the main IT corridor of Hyderabad and Google will build its own facility. This facility for Google in Hyderabad, the capital city of the state of Telangana when fully built will be one of the largest facility globally with a built up space of about 2 Million sft and one of the largest campus for Google globally outside of the United States. The envisioned facility in Hyderabad will be Google’s first-ever own campus in INDIA. With the establishment of Google’s campus for the first time in Asia, 13,000 people would get employment in the coming four years. KTR said Google representatives informed him that they will increase the employees’ number from the existing 6,500 to 13,000. The proposed campus will become a No. 1 campus in Asia.
KTR and the Secretary also had a meeting with Bram Bout, Director of Google Education, Rajen Sheth, Senior Director of Product Management for Android and Chrome for Work and Education. The Minister discussed several plans for upgrading the educational standards and technology as a means to drive the education. The Minister wanted Google to associate with the Government of Telangana to support the ambitious Digital Telangana program, particularly the component that intends to promote digital literacy amongst school children. Google was urged to utilize the CSR component for channeling the hardware infrastructure, content and training to the Government Schools across the State. The proposal resonates with Google’s ongoing efforts in the Chrome Notebook education model, which has already been piloted in 4 schools in Warangal district 6 months ago.
The delegation led by the Minister met with the Google Street View team of Mr.Manik Gupta, Director of Product Management and Mr. Narayana Tummala, Ground Truth Engineering Lead for Google. While Streetview has been extensively used in USA, Canada and many European countries, its applications in India have been limited so far. Google has launched streetview in some of the tourist sites like Taj Mahal, Qutub Minar, etc in partnership with the Archaeological Society of India. The Streetview is also brought into the National Gallery of Modern art in India with a very high-resolution imagery.
Google is in talks with Minister of Home affairs to get their permissions for conducting the Streetview exercise at a city wide level. This permission is expected to be given shortly. Upon the request made by the Minister, Google has agreed to make Telangana the first state which will get Streetview for one complete city namely Hyderabad to begin with, with subsequent extension to other major cities and towns. Google has also agreed to support specific requests made by the Minister to utilize Streetview for monitoring of deviations from approved building plans, property tax collection, mapping of industrial land bank located in different parts of the state, to name a few. Getting this important commitment from Google StreetView to consider Telangana for piloting all their major initiatives in the country is seen as a major achievement for the state.
Google Fiber explored for Telangana
The delegation led by the IT Minister detailed the Google team about the Water grid project and how the same duct lines are going to be utilized to provide fiber optic cables to every household. Google has embarked on a similar project called Google Fiber, which is been piloted, in 8 cities in the USA like Kansas City, Austin, etc. Google has agreed to study the Telangana model in detail through their country team in India and explore the possibility of contributing to this project. (NSS)