Street View Feature Added to Google Maps in India, To Cover 50 Cities by 2022
July 27, 2022 (Wednesday): Starting today, the Street View feature with a 360-degree panoramic view has been made available on Google Maps. Three AGI members – Google, Genesys International, and Tech Mahindra have partnered for this initiative.
The initiative has been made possible due to the liberalization and deregulation of the Geospatial sector with the Department of Science and Technology’s new Geospatial Guidelines released in February 2021. The revised Guidelines give more freedom to Geospatial companies like Google, Genesys International, and Tech Mahindra to acquire, process, and publish data for services, like Street View. The highly inhibitive Geospatial data sector has now been opened up in line with the Hon’ble Prime Minister’s vision of an atmanirbhar, technologically advanced New India.
Google’s Street View feature is now available in 10 Indian cities: Ahmednagar, Amritsar, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Nashik, Pune, and Vadodara. 50 more cities will be covered by the end of 2022, mapping over 700,000 km. Street views will be updated once every two years for this feature.
Google India Country Head and Vice President, Sanjay Gupta inaugurated the Street View launch event by highlighting how “At Google, we take pride in understanding what consumers need. Our CEO says – When you solve for India, you solve for the world. Working with partners like Genesys and Tech Mahindra, we continue to be driven by our time-tested global mission statement – to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and resourceful.”
With the transformative new feature, Google Maps hopes to impact not just the safety & security, ease of commute, search for amenities, emergency services, and places for over a billion Indian citizens, but also the visibility and congruence of the country’s small and medium enterprises that rely on Google Maps as their primary means of an online presence.
More than 30 million local businesses use Google Maps, which drives more than 700 million direct connections between merchants and consumers every month through messages, forms, click-throughs to websites, and so on.
“Two years, we committed to investing more in India, and turbo-charge the country’s digital transformation to ensure that everyone can gain from the new digital economy,” Mr. Gupta added. “This is why we are actively engaging in local partnerships as we build a better Maps experience for India.”
Vice President, Google Maps Experiences, Miriam Karthika Daniel noted, “14 years ago, Google Maps set out with an ambitious goal to provide the people of India the most comprehensive, accurate, and helpful map of the world. Since then, we’ve been building maps, customized for the unique needs of the people of India to help them navigate everyday challenges and explore them in uniquely relevant ways. Features such as offline maps, two-wheeler mode, and landmark place navigation are unique to India; once we built them for India, we took them global and scaled them to other countries. This underscores India’s importance as the hub for global innovation.”
AGI Members Google India, Genesys International, and Tech Mahindra have partnered for India Street View Feature (L-R: Roli Agarwal, Sajid Malik, and CP Gurnani)
Genesys International Chairman and Managing Director, Sajid Malik and Managing Director and CEO, Tech Mahindra, C P Gurnani were in a fireside chat with Google India Head of Product Partnerships Roli Agarwal at the event. Mr. Malik remarked on Genesys’ role in the Street View initiative, “We see that millions of businesses will now get an enhanced digital presence using Street View… Urban India lives in its narrow roads and gullies. There is so much economic activity in the smaller parts of big cities, and the technology we have developed together to capture that is fundamentally germane to that experience, and this has been a very exciting part of the journey.
Mr. Gurnani noted, “Definitive steps such as Google’s Street View launch are necessary for the vision of One India, inclusive India, and immersive India. We have had an exciting journey with Google over the last 20 years spanning multiple projects such as WiFi for Indian Railways, Google Cloud, content management on YouTube, and so on. But I am particularly excited about the Street View because this is where we are enabling a common man to navigate using his local language, or his limited knowledge of English to see where he is going.”
India is developing at a phenomenal rate, with new businesses, new infrastructure, and new use cases emerging with every passing day. The drive and contribution of AGI members like Google, Genesys, and Tech Mahindra to accurately model, reflect and solve these using Geospatial technologies are critical to a rapidly evolving India.
About AGI India
The Association of Geospatial Industries (AGI) is an industry-led non-profit non-government professional organization that represents the interests of the geospatial industry in India and works towards the advancement of geospatial technologies and their applications.
AGI serves as a forum for the exchange of ideas, techniques, approaches, and experiences by those who design, implement, and use geospatial technology solutions. Our members represent various aspects of Geospatial technologies, including satellite-based remote sensing, aerial and drone-based survey, LiDAR, ground-based survey, GIS, Cloud computing, services, and solutions.
Contact: megha.datta@agiindia.com
