How a Google India co-founder uses crowdsourcing to help India's have-nots

Lalitesh Katragadda says he is is drawn to crowdsourcing because it is essentially about people helping themselves and others solve their problems while technology is an enabler

When Lalitesh Katragadda was faced with the challenge of lowering the cost of building Google Maps to make it viable for a country like India, he turned to crowdsourcing. Since then, the inventor of Google Map Maker, one of the most successful and largest implementations of crowdsourcing in technology globally, hasn’t stopped looking at the technique as a mean to solve India’s many problems cheaply, reliably and at scale.

Katragadda, an alumnus of IIT-Bombay and a Ph.D in Robotics from the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University, became part of Google in 2002 when Sphereo, a robotics start-up he founded in San Francisco, got acquired by the search giant. Two years later, he moved back to India to set up Google’s India operations, the first engineering centre for the company outside of its headquarters in the US. It is at Google India that Katragadda built Google Map Maker, a tool that eventually led to the creation of Google Maps, while he also played key role in the development of other major projects at the company such as Google Finance and Hindi Transliteration. 

Crowdsourcing, as you might have guessed, is also the flavour of Katragadda’s latest startup, Indihood, through which he plans to alleviate basic livelihood problems that plague India’s one billion under-served population. One of the biggest pieces that keeps drawing him back to crowdsourcing, he says, is because it is essentially about people helping themselves and others solve their problems while technology just plays the role of an enabler. It’s also why Katragadda has spent the last few years aiding the technology development of Aadhaar and India Stack, which he believes will be the building blocks for a lot of innovation in India.

“The name Indihood has two meanings, just like most words in Sanskrit. It means India’s various neighbourhoods as well as Indie, which is about people doing it themselves. So we imagine a world where people in India and elsewhere will manage and create unique neighbourhoods using a digital system. We want neighbourhoods to be far more well-knit and people, both from the bottom of the pyramid as well as the top, help each other in solving their problems,” says Katragadda.

The first use the technology that Indihood is building will be seen not in its own product, but by Avanti, a financial inclusion startup that has been co-founded by Nandan Nilekani, Ratan Tata and Vijay Kelkar, which is expected to go live early next year. While Katragadda is hesitant to give details about the role Indihood’s technology will play just yet, he says, he’s spent the last four years after quitting Google to travel across the depth and breadth of the country to really understand what the majority of people need. 

Katragadda has worked on eliminating the problem of connectivity to the Internet by architecting projects like the AP Fibre Grid, which eventually led him to the job of advising the Government of India on its Bharat Net project. Today, he’s extremely proud that the works he did in his home state of Andhra Pradesh has set the bar for high-speed broadband connectivity for every citizen in the country, while still ensuring that the business model is financially viable. It’s sort of Katragadda’s mantra that nothing should be a handout, but that innovation should help make things more affordable for everyone.

While Katragadda has become one of the most ardent supporters of local innovation, his previous American employer has is now steadily building on top of the foundations he had laid, to tap into the next billion users themselves. Google’s Next Billion User (NBU) programme brings Katragadda’s idea of using reducing cost, increasing scale and solving problems of people beyond the top 300 million Indians to the front and centre. 

But he doesn’t fret losing control of this massive market opportunity to foreign companies just yet and believes that it’s good for a giant like Google to step into the game as it will show others that there’s an opportunity in the making.