Modi travelled to West Coast where he visited the Facebook headquarters for a town hall Q&A with its CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
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“California is the place where [information technology] and our democratic values have tied us together in a union”, Modi said.
Although it was planned well in advance, one of the most concrete announcements from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s whirlwind trip to Silicon Valley was that Google plans to equip Indian railway stations with public Wi-Fi.
Modi, who took a tour of the Google campus seeing the latest products and forward-looking researches, was given a presentation of Google Earth in which the ghats of his Lok Sabha constituency Varanasi were shown.
So that is when Zuckerberg flew to India, visited the temple, and spent nearly a month travelling around the country.
“We must bridge the digital divide and promote digital literacy in the same way that we seek to ensure general literacy”, Modi said, according to prepared remarks.
Minister Narendra Modi during his on going visit to the USA visited Tesla Motors yesterday.
“Some of our initiatives include making our products work on low bandwidth and even offline, making the Web accessible in Indic language, providing low-cost Chromebooks in Indian schools, investing in core infrastructure and affordable smartphone with Android One”, he said.
“But this product in no way connects to or registers support for Internet.org. We are changing the code today to eliminate any confusion”, he added. He also urged other world leaders to use social media to bridge the gap between governments and the people.
“I wasn’t fortunate enough to get a lot of knowledge, but I was able to make up for that through social media”, he said through a translator.
India is synonymous to technology and innovation. India also has 132 million Facebook users-only second to the US-and has made WhatsApp the most popular app in the country.
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Modi said he had seen “the driving force of our relationship”, in Silicon Valley.
