Off to a Mumbai train station – to catch free wifi from Google!

Photo credit: Nupur Barua

You may have steered clear of railway stations in India’s business capital all this while to avoid being swept away by the milling crowds. But here’s why you should give it a shot from today – even if you don’t want to catch a train!

Mumbai Central has just become the first railway station in India to get free wifi from Google. You will get an idea of just how many people will benefit from that if I told you that over 960 individual trains chug in and out of Mumbai Central.

And this is just the beginning. Indians can expect around 100 busiest stations to be granted free wifi by the end of 2016. Google has tied up with government-run RailTel Corporation of India to eventually provide wifi connectivity at over 400 stations.

“By end of this year over 10 million people will be able to enjoy this experience at 100 stations spread across the country,” Google India head Rajan Anandan said in a statement. Allahabad, Patna, Jaipur, and Ranchi are up next.

Whether you want to download a video for the train journey or just search the net, you can do it all sitting on a bench at the railway station. The wifi is free for the first 30 minutes over a 24-hour period.

Connectivity should not be a problem if Google is to be believed. It will be “many times faster than what most people in India have access to today,” Google’s India-born CEO Sundar Pichai promised during his visit to India in December.

Travelling smart, with Google

Photo credit: buba69

This is largest public wifi project in India. By all counts Mumbai was a good place to flag it off as around 7 million people hop on to trains there every day.

“It will be especially useful for quick messages, updates on location, and checking mail,” believes Nishant Sharma, who frequently uses trains from Mumbai Central. He is the CEO of Navayuvak Entrepreneurs, a community for Mumbai’s startup entrepreneurs.

The number of internet users is multiplying in India. Around 350 million are already using it, 60 percent of them via smartphones, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India.

Now juxtapose that with the number of rail users. India has one of the world’s largest rail networks in the world, with 7,172 train stations that cover 115,000 km. Over 23 million people use these trains on a daily basis.

How it’s being done