Here’s a peek into the goodie bag from Google for the Indian PM on his Silicon Valley tour

There’s something romantic about a train journey in India. Every day, more than 23 million Indians – half of them suburban passengers – take a train. That adds up to 8.4 billion passengers in a year. India has one of the world’s largest rail networks, crisscrossing the country – 115,000 km of it connecting 7,172 train stations.

Google’s announcement today of bringing high speed public wifi to 400 train stations in India is therefore a big deal. This brings the internet to more Indians, starting with 10 million train travelers a day, says Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, who is also an Indian. The service will be free to begin with.

This will be the largest public wifi project in India, and one of the largest in the world by number of potential users. Pichai made this announcement just before meeting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California today.

Great honor to welcome @narendramodi to Google today and support his plans for #DigitalIndia https://t.co/xD7vq7Qzah

— sundarpichai (@sundarpichai) September 27, 2015

The announcement by Google is a big win for Modi, who is in the US for a series of meetings with tech giants to garner support for his government’s “Digital India” and “Make in India” initiatives. He met Qualcomm executive chairman Dr. Paul E. Jacobs yesterday, who announced an India-specific US$150 million venture capital fund for startups in the mobile and internet-of-everything ecosystems.

Apple CEO Tim Cook and Tesla CEO Elon Musk were among the others Modi met during a tour of Silicon Valley yesterday. And today, apart from Google, Modi visited the Facebook offices and the SAP Centre in San Jose, where he addressed a 20,000-strong gathering of Indian-Americans.

He will next meet US president Barack Obama.

Connecting the next 1 billion

India has about 350 million active internet users, 60 percent of whom access the internet via smartphones, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India. In the last six months alone, 50 million new users came online. No wonder investors are racing to pump more and more money to Indian tech startups. What’s making them salivate are the one billion Indians who aren’t yet online but are on their way.

“We’d like to help get these next billion Indians online – so they can access the entire web, and all of its information and opportunity,” the Google CEO says in an official statement.

In the coming months, Google’s Access & Energy team will work with Indian Railways and RailTel, which provides internet services via fiber network along railway lines, to bring public wifi to train stations. “The network will expand quickly to cover 100 of the busiest stations in India before the end of 2016, with the remaining stations following in quick succession,” Pichai says.

Android One, YouTube offline, and now, public wifi