Google India to help 50 mn women get online by next year

It's the time of women empowerment. Internet is a boon for people in today's age and what better way to empower women than through internet. Google has launched an initiative to make more and more women help come online and become internet savvy. With over 200 mn internet users in the country and growing, India is on its way to become the second largest Internet market in the world overtaking US. But only one third of India's online users are women. .

Research and studies conducted by various organisations prove that Internet can help Indian women overcome many challenges. It can help women achieve self esteem, express their views freely, open up new opportunities and help them to gain education. On the macro level, these benefits can translate into lowering maternal and infant mortality rates, uplift in GDP of the country and improve their standard of living and status in the society.

"Lack of easy access to Internet, lack of knowledge on how to use the Internet and its relevance in their daily lives are the biggest barriers for women to get online. ‘Helping women get online' is an initiative that aims to overcome these barriers and empower women to improve their lives. With this initiative we are aiming to help 50 million additional women to get online by end of 2014 by undertaking a variety of initiatives across India. We have already seen many cases of women benefiting greatly by using the Internet and we are really delighted to partner with leading brands in the country to join us in this ambitious project." said Rajan Anandan, MD and VP Sales & Operations for Google India.

The initiative will focus on creating awareness about the benefits of Internet for women, educate women to use the Internet to improve their lives and work with partners to enable easy Internet access points for women in the country. Yonca Brunini, global lead, Tech For Good and VP, marketing Google said, "We are very excited to launch this first of its kind campaign in India. At Google, we want to contribute our knowledge and skills to help use technology to address humanity's greatest challenges. I am delighted to share the success of a pilot program that was carried out by us at a village in Bhilwara, Rajasthan. With this project we successfully completed a digital literacy effort of training over 100,000 women in Bhilwara and trained them on how to use the basic applications on the Internet. The learnings from the pilot will help us to work on a framework which we will use to roll out in other parts of India."

The program will be supported by Intel, HUL and Axis Bank who have committed to drive this initiative through the joint outreach efforts including Internet training in their digital literacy efforts. Intel is also launching a mobile app called "Easy Step" for women which would be available on Android playstore.