Google to help Modi government set up free wifi at 500 railway stations

NEW DELHI: Google will soon help India set up base for free Wi-Fi at 500 railway stations.

At the Digital India dinner at San Jose on Sunday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, "We are expanding our public wifi hotspots. We want to ensure that free wifi is not only there at airports, but also on our railway platforms.”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the prime minister would make the announcement while touring the offices of the internet giant in a few hours.

Promising to transform governance, the PM said in a nation of one billion cell phones, M-Governance or mobile governance has the potential to make development a truly inclusive and comprehensive mass movement.

"It puts governance within everyone's reach," Modi said while pitching his pet Digital India initiative with the titans of the IT world here.

"We will connect all schools and colleges with broadband. Building I-ways are as important as highways," he said.

The government, he said, wants to free citizens from the burden of excessive paper documents in every office.

"We want paperless transactions. We will set up a digital locker for every citizen to store personal documents that can be shared across departments," he said.

Setting up of Ebiz portal has made approvals for businesses and citizens easy and efficient, technology is being used to impart scale and speed to development, he said.

Calling for bridging the digital divide and promote digital literacy, Modi said in the same way that we seek to ensure general literacy, technology must be accessible, affordable and value adding.

Modi also promised to make governance more accountable and transparent while assuring data privacy and security.

"As our economy and our lives get more wired, we are also giving the highest importance to data privacy and security, intellectual property rights and cyber security," he said at a dinner interaction attended among others by Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayan, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Qualcomm executive chairman Paul Jacobs and Google CEO Sunder Pichai.

"We will transform governance, making it more transparent, accountable, accessible and participative," Modi said, adding that E-Governance is foundation of better governance - efficient, economical and effective.