Managing Director for Google South East Asia and India Rajan Anandan (right) speaks at the launch of Android Nanodegree in India as (from left) Senior Programme Manager (Developer Relations) for Google Peter Lubbers, Development Manager for Tata Trusts Ganesh Neelam and founder and CEO of Udacity Sebastian Thrun look on in Bengaluru yesterday.

Agencies/Bengaluru

Search engine giant Google and online education company Udacity yesterday launched IT courses in India, branching outside the US to tap the country’s millions of software developers scrambling for jobs.
The pair teamed with Indian conglomerate Tata to offer online technical training courses, focusing on teaching software developers to build apps for Android, the Google-backed mobile operating system.
Costing Rs9,800 ($148) a month, the degrees will take between six and nine months to complete, with lessons from Google instructors based in the US. Students will get 50% of tuition costs back on graduation.
Google is looking to cash in on skilling up many of India’s 3.6mn developers, the second largest number worldwide, while at the same time seeking more developers who can programme for Android devices.
“While India has millions of software developers, we still lag behind in creating world-class apps,” Google India managing director Rajan Anandan told reporters in India’s IT hub of Bengaluru.
The companies will also offer 1,000 scholarships and all graduates will be invited to a job fair next year hosted by Google in India.
Udacity will provide Android Nanodegree to Indian developers after the course, designed to help them learn new skills and advance their careers from anywhere on any device.
“The programme is meant to bridge the gap in creating world-class applications by the Indian developer community, as just 2% of the top 1,000 apps on Google Play were created by Indian developers,” said Anandan.
By offering the course, Google plans to ensure that 10% of applications on Android are built by Indian developers over the next three years.
“Our mission is to democratise education for everyone, to help people get jobs they want and they dream of. We are glad to launch the Android Nanodegree course in India in partnership with Google and Tata Trusts,” said Udacity founder and chief executive Sebastian Thrun.
“Through this initiative with Google, we hope to build the digital ecosystem and create a sustainable difference to empower communities across the country,” Tata Trusts development manager Ganesh Neelam said.
The need to build mobile application developers on a large scale stems from their acute shortage worldwide, especially in developing countries like India where 65% of users access Internet on mobile as against 15% in China and 12-13% in the US.
Of the 350mn internet users in India currently, about 150mn access the Internet on smartphones, against 20mn of 100mn users in 2011.
According to a survey by the Indian Internet Mobile Association, of the estimated 500mn Internet users in 2017, 400mn will browse or surf the Net on smartphones, indicating the huge potential for developing hundreds of mobile apps to meet their multiple needs.
The launch of the IT course comes as Prime Minister Narendra Modi heads to Silicon Valley this weekend as part of a visit to the US, seeking foreign investment in India’s plethora of start-ups as well as financial tie-ups with US tech giants.
Modi, who will meet Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg, is expected to reassure IT CEOs of efforts to reduce red tape and make it easier to do business in India, a massive market of 1.26bn people.
India also boasts a large number of engineering and IT specialists who have left the country to rise to the top of the US corporate world, including Google’s new chief executive Sundar Pichai and Microsoft boss Satya Nadella.