Google CEO Sundar Pichai to kickstart New Year with an event in India

Google’s Sundar Pichai will kick off the new year with some major announcements for small businesses in India.

The company will hold a media event in New Delhi on Jan where Pichai will be present, Google said in a media invite. The event will also be attended by India's IT Minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad.

According to local reports, India-born Pichai landed in the country with his family last week.

At the event, Google will unveil new cloud and enterprise focused features aimed at Indian businesses. "At Google, we are excited about partnering with businesses to help them unlock exponential growth through the power of digital," the invite reads.

The company could also share some updates on several of its consumer-centric services, an insider told Mashable India. This will be Pichai's second appearance at a media event in India since he became CEO of Google last year.

In December last year, Pichai visited India to share developments on the company's free Wi-FI project for railway stations and also talked about his journey to Google. Last week, Google said 100 railway stations in India now have its free Wi-Fi.

Last year, Google said it hopes to help 20 million small and medium enterprises in India get online by 2017. It had also announced an app called Google My Business, a tool aimed at helping businesses create and manage their business information across Google products for free in English as well as local languages.

India is specially an important market for Google. Much like how the company is helping bring much of the population in the country online, it also sees an opportunity of getting businesses on the web.