New Delhi, Feb 21 (IANS): As India elections inch closer, Google on Thursday announced to train journalists in online verification and fact-checking, digital safety and security, YouTube for elections coverage and data visualization for elections.

Google News Initiative, in partnership with independent, third-party organisations DataLeads and Internews would host training sessions in 30 cities between February 26 and April 6 in English, Hindi, Malayalam, Bangla, Kannada, Gujarati, Odia, Tamil, Telugu and Marathi, the company said in a statement.

"The Google News Initiative is proud to be supporting journalists in India as they prepare to cover the upcoming elections. Since 2016, Google has trained more than 13,000 journalists in India, across over 200 newsrooms and in 40 cities," said Irene Jay Liu, Google News Lab Lead, Asia-Pacific.

Working journalists and freelancers covering elections can apply for the free training workshops.

Google would organise the training session in the Delhi-NCR region on February 26.

Google launched the "Google News Initiative India Training Network" last year, focused on online verification and fact-checking.

In six months, the Network onboarded 241 trainers in seven languages, who have so far trained 5,260 journalists across over 40 cities in India.

For 2019, Google plans to train another 10,000 journalists in India under this programme.