In a bid to support the Indian language news ecosystem and expand the Indian language web broadly, Google India on Thursday announced that Google News will now support two more Indian languages, Gujarati and Punjabi. With this, Google News now supports 10 regional languages in India. Google News is the primary source for breaking news headlines and personalised news stories for most smartphone users and with the addition of Gujarati and Punjabi local languages, the feature will become accessible to people across India in 10 languages.
The Indian languages now available on Google News are Bengali, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.
The GNI Indian Languages Program, announced earlier this year, has received over 600 applications from news publishers across India. Of these, over 300 publishers have been selected to participate in the program, which will provide them with support to modernize their digital ecosystem and improve the user experience across web, mobile and app.
This comprehensive initiative has been designed to empower news publishers by providing them with access to essential resources and support. The program delivery will be in nine languages, including English, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Malayalam, Gujarati, and Marathi, making it Google's most diverse technology program for news publishers.
The tech giant also hosted the second edition of the Google India News Summit, a forum bringing together news publishers from across the country for conversations around the future of news. The summit is part of an ongoing effort to support journalism and media organizations in the digital age. The event saw participation from leading publishers who shared knowledge on how they’ve leveraged technology tools and Google’s enablement programs to reorient their businesses for the digital consumer.
The event was opened by Nandan Nilekani, founding chairman of UIDAI, who delivered a keynote about the significant shifts brought about in the Indian digital economy through digital public infrastructure.
“Google has been a long-standing partner of the news industry and the Google News Summit is our endeavor to facilitate discussions and knowledge sharing that can help the news industry make a successful transition to digital. The addition of supported languages on Google News, is one way in which we want to keep driving the expansion of the Indian language internet, so that more and more users are able to harness the power of information. News publishers are core to this effort and we remain committed to partnering with the news ecosystem," Sanjay Gupta, Country Manager and Vice President, Google India, said in a statement.