Google’s head of public policy for India Archana Gulati has resigned within five months of taking up the job at a time when the tech giant is expecting the outcome of two antitrust cases in the country, according to reports. Gulati, a former joint secretary of NITI Aayog and an official of the Competition Commission of India (CCI), was appointed as the public policy head (India) at Google earlier this year after her voluntary retirement in 2021. She was handling digital communications policy at NITI Aayog before stepping down in April last year.
For the last five months, Gulati led a team of public policy executives at Google, who worked on the regulatory implications for the tech giant in India, which the company has widely regarded as one of its key growth markets.
According to a Reuters report, the reasons for Gulati's resignation were not immediately clear and a spokesperson for Google also declined to comment.
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Google is facing a series of antitrust cases in India with the Competition Commission of India looking into Google's business conduct and the alleged unfair advantage of its dominant position in the smart TV market, its in-app payments system and its Android operating system.
The competition watchdog is likely to deliver its verdict soon in at least two antitrust cases against Google, Reuters reported quoting sources familiar with the matter.
The CCI started a probe against Google in April 2019 for its alleged abuse of Android's dominance in India after two antitrust research associates and a law school student filed a complaint against the tech giant in 2018.
In June 2021, the competition watchdog ordered a probe against the tech giant on allegations that it was abusing its dominance in the Android operating system in India's smart television market after two lawyers Kshitiz Arya and Purushottam Anand filed a case against Google.
Gulati’s resignation comes at a time when Google is navigating a period of slow growth, cost-cutting and employee dissent over cultural changes. Addressing questions of employees at an all-hands meeting recently, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that the tech giant was being “a bit more responsible through one of the toughest macroeconomic conditions underway in the past decade", CNBC reported.
Responding to a question from an employee on potential job cuts, Pichai said it’s not a scalable way to tell the entire workforce about job cuts, but ensured that he would “try and notify the company of the more important updates".
(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)
