During the hour-long Q&A session at Facebook’s Menlo Park, California, campus, Modi fielded several questions about the potential of social media and his thoughts on women’s empowerment. “In India, there are hundreds and thousands of mothers like that … mothers who’ve sacrificed their entire lives for their children”.
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In this context, he said the internet and social media has been playing an important role in improving governance and diploamcy. At a town hall event held with Facebook, the Prime Minister teared up as he discussed his mother.
He also announced the company’s Design India initiative and proposal to set up labs which would help the “Make in India” programme.
There had been a positive impact of Modi’s visit to the U.S., Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) spokesperson M.J. Akbar said at a press conference here while pointing out to the headlines of various national dailies. Facebookj CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he considers India a “temple” of knowledge from where he took inspiration to rebuild Facebook when the company went through a “rough patch” and was on the verge of being sold over 10 years ago. Modi said he hoped to build a optical fiber network to provide villages across his country with internet, said the report. “To leaders all over the world, you are not going to gain by running away from social media”, he said.
Zuckerberg said Modi is “setting an example” for how world leaders should connect with their citizens.
Prime Minister Modi said from Facebook headquarters that social media has huge strengths and benefits which can help governments take corrective steps if any wrong decision is taken. He notes that there’s still over a billion of them in his native country that aren’t connected.
The the event, Google chief Sundar Pichai also spoke about the company teaming up with the Indian Railways and emphasised on how Chrome topped the charts in India, before it became the most widely used browser across the world. Facebook has already gone some way in helping connect India with its internet.org project, which offers free access to a number of selected websites and apps, although the tech giant has been criticized for favoring its own services over Indian equivalents.
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“We’ve had a deterioration” in gender equality, Modi said, “but as far as the government is concerned, if we want to achieve our economic goals, then we can not do that if we imprison 50% of population inside their homes”.
