Google India has partnered with the Government of Maharashtra to provide its digital classroom services to enable remote learning for 2.30 crore students and teachers.
The state government will be providing educators and students with their own G Suite ID through which they we will be able to make use of free learning tools like G Suite for Education, Classroom, Google Meet and others owing to the Covid-19 Pandemic lockdown.
Announcing the collaboration, Bani Paintal Dhawan, head of education, India and South Asia, Google India, said, “Google has also made a hub for educators named as ‘Teach from Anywhere’, in Marathi, a very popular language in the state.” Google has claimed that over 20% of total 7,00,000 school teachers in the State have enrolled for its first teacher-teaching programs.
Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray at the launch said “In the Corona crisis when the world is at a standstill, how to restart education is one of the primary concerns we face today. I feel this global crisis has led us from the present to the future.”
Google recently committed to invest $10 billion to accelerate the adoption of digital services by 2027. It infused $5.7 billion in Reliance-owned Jio last month. India has been one of the critical markets for Google, and its focus on the country has been deepening in the last few years. The company recently partnered with CBSE to enable million-plus teachers across 22,000 schools in India to deliver blended learning by the end of 2020.
Google-owned YouTube had launched a learning destination to supplement curriculum learning for students and also support general skill-building in April this year. In 2018, Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, had granted $3 million to Central Square Foundation and The Teacher App to bridge the learning gap in India.
Through this collaboration, Maharashtra becomes the first state to adopt Google technologies which would impact over 1 lakh schools in the state.