With most of the 200 million-odd English speakers already online, the growth of Internet in India will depend on lowering the entry barriers for the rest of the population. “To reach to our goal of 500 million Internet users by 2017 we need to make the Internet accessible to those who don’t speak English,” said Google India MD Rajan Anandan. He said most of the 5 million Internet users being added everyday are on the mobile and not all of them speak English. As a measure of the lack of Hindi content in the country, he said there were just 22,000 Wikipedia entries in the language while 400 million people spoke the language.
Inaugurating the initiative, Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar said he was confident that this can change the technology landscape of the country. “ We are very adaptive and have accepted new technology and techniques, be it in the farm or our workplace. It just has to be easy,” he said.
