The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) has named Rajan Anandan, Google’s vice-president, Southeast Asia and India, as its new chairman. He will take over from Kunal Shah, Co-founder and Chairman of FreeCharge.
Deep Kalra, Chairman & Group CEO, MakeMyTrip is the new Vice Chairman of IAMAI. Kalra takes over from Vinodh Bhat, Co-founder and president of Saavn. Umang Bedi, Managing Director, India and South Asia at Facebook, has been elected as the new treasurer. Subho Ray will continue as the President of IAMAI.
The new council is elected for a tenure of two years. IAMAI is the country’s leading association of digital companies and its member count includes nearly 300 Indian and overseas companies and has offices in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kolkata. The association said that the new council will focus on expanding internet user base, especially in rural areas, promote local language content and the digital start-up ecosystem in the country.
The new position has given Anandan a new confidence, who believes, “Currently, much of the content on the internet is in English, and accounts for nearly 56% of the content on the worldwide web, while Indian languages account for less than 0.1%. Enabling Indic content on the internet will lead to a growth of 39% with the current internet user base of India.”
An active angel investor in early stage technology companies, Anandan has invested in over 45 technology startups in India. He is also the co-founder of Blue Ocean Ventures, the first seed fund in Sri Lanka. Blue Ocean started investing in 2012 and has made over 10 investments in Sri Lanka.
Anandan’s career has spanned high technology and management consulting. Rajan is currently a Vice President of Google, Inc. In his current role Rajan is the Managing Director of Google India and is responsible for Google’s operations in India.
Prior to Google, he was the Managing Director of Microsoft in India. In this role Rajan was responsible for leading the Sales Marketing and Services Group (SMSG) in India and led the largest software company in India. He also worked as Vice President with Dell and held several global leadership roles. He started as the Executive Assistant to the Chairman and CEO Michael Dell and then held several global roles including leading a large part of Dell International Services and Country General Manager of Dell India.
An MSc. in Manufacturing Systems Engineering from Stanford University and a BSc. in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Anandan told ET in a recent interview, “The consumption in local languages is going to be explosive. However, there is not enough content which is being created right now…” This would perhaps be an area Anandan will explore more as the head of IAMAI.