Observing that the world is looking at India with hopes, he said, the opposition should join hands with the government and extend constructive support to certain legislations. “This is music to our ears”, said 23-year-old Ashna Jain, reacting to Modi’s comments.
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Those with Modi included Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar, Joint Secretary (Americas) Vinay Kwatra and Ambassador Arun Singh.
Zuckerberg even mentioned his spiritual trip to India which has played a significant role in reaffirming Facebook’s goal which is to connect people from different parts of the world. He notes that there’s still over a billion of them in his native country that aren’t connected.
But he has critics: a few activists organized protests on Sunday to press the prime minister over creation of a Sikh homeland, along with alleged mistreatment of Muslims and Christians by groups linked to his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.
In addition to meeting Cook, Modi also spent time with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook headquarters, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Tesla Motor’s Elon Musk.
The crowds broke into chants of “Modi, Modi” as the prime minister dressed in white kurta and churidars and a light cream Nehru jacket walked to the stage of San Jose’s SAP arena.
Before the event, 40 startups each from India and the U.S. had a India-US Konnect 2015 event organised in collaboration with TiE Silicon Valley and IIM Ahmedabad’s CIIE India. US tech interests, however, would like to see Modi trim what they view as bureaucratic and financial restrictions on investment there.
Modi’s first engagement of the day after his arrival here was with Cameron.
“We discussed how we can further refine our strategic vision”, said Obama after the hour-long talks. Critics in India said the project favors Facebook and a limited number of partners, while making it more hard for homegrown entrepreneurs to draw traffic to their own websites. Facebook announced last week that it has launched a new platform for outside developers to contribute apps to the program.
Modi’s tour of the Silicon Valley comes alongside Chinese President Xi Jinping’s meeting with United States technology executives in Seattle. This means there are now more Internet users in India than in every country in the world aside from China.
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Modi said that instead a positive approach that includes help for developing countries like financing and technology transfer was needed.
