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,