Dear Sundar Pichai: There’s a lot you take on when you take on the task of digitising India. Here are a few pointers | Bhaskar Chakravorti in The Indian Express

In his latest op-ed for The Indian Express, Fletcher Dean Bhaskar Chakravorti writes about eight digital realities of the Indian market.

Congratulations on surviving the marathon grilling by US lawmakers. While a major complaint was about Google cosying up to China, I found it interesting that no one seemed bothered by the fact that you had just dropped $10 billion on a different foreign country — India. That is a hefty sum. It is equal to Facebook’s entire annual R&D budget. It is over 10 times the money set aside for 100 smart cities and almost 20 times that for Digital India in the last Indian government Budget.

You have spoken of the purpose of this munificence — digitising India — in the broadest of terms. The only specifics are that some of the money will find its way to India’s richest man and his brainchild, Jio. But for the rest of the country, here are eight specific digital realities you should note.

Bhaskar Chakravorti, The Indian Express