Google is looking beyond the urban market in India. It is launching multiple initiatives aimed at increasing its reach to the rural users.

The company is developing customized content for rural customers, including weather updates, crop patterns and other local data.

Google News launched in Hindi last week. Google Samachar gathers news stories from the various Hindi news sources on the Web and presents a ranked one-page summary with links to news sources.

Considering low PC penetration in India, Google is betting heavily on the mobile platform. It plans to tie up with mobile operators and introduce services like Google Talk and Google Maps on phones. Google will also introduce its AdWords program for mobiles in India.

Orkut is hugely popular here. I think it's the number one social networking site in India. Google has plans to introduce it in Indian languages and launch its mobile version also.

Google is looking to license content from broadcasting companies and film content owners, intended perhaps for YouTube or Google Video. Last year, Google Book Search tied up with Indian book publishers to index Indian titles for online search. India is the third-largest publisher of English books.

"How to make the search engine simpler and uncomplicated is a big challenge, but we will have an answer soon," Google VP (APAC & Latin America) Sukhinder Singh Cassidy told Business Standard.

A growing number of companies in various sectors including FMCG, telecom and retail are investing in the rural market and seeing it as critical to their next phase of growth. Exposure to TV has brought about a major change in psychographics of the rural population contributing to an increase in their aspirations and demands. Also, economic development of the last few decades has increased disposable income and upward socio-economic mobility.

Data published by the National Council of Applied Economic Research shows that the income of rural India has grown several-fold in the last 10 years. Today's rural India is not entirely dependent on an agrarian economy. The ratio between those who are involved in agriculture and in other business is estimated to be 60:40. Also, the total expenditure of urban India is almost equal to that of rural India.

But the urban-rural divide does exist in India. For example, teledensity is less than two in rural India, while it's over 50 in Delhi and Mumbai. But it can also be construed as an opportunity. According to a recent McKinsey survey, rural india will be a market worth US$500-$600 billion by 2020. Therefore, it's only natural that Google is setting its eyes on non-urban India in its quest to grow its reach and profts.