India, China growth will help dream of Asian century: Modi

His sister-in-law, Sonika, enjoys posting selfies on Facebook and follows the YouTube musings of Lilly Singh, an Indo-Canadian comedian. Besides, they also sought intervention of the government to augment the government incentives in order to build proper infrastructure which is the backbone of every startup.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella announced many initiatives, including using the white spaces in TV broadcasting to reach India’s six lakh villages, as well as more investments. India will henceforth become a province of the Republic of Facebook.

He recalled Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to India in September 2014 and his visit to China in May 2015 and said the meeting “covered significant ground in advancing our partnership”. As an Indian student in an American university not far from the Silicon Valley, the atmosphere around the speech, akin to the energy and excitement surrounding the performance by a music band, had me riveted alongside the 20,000-odd adoring fans packed into San Jose’s SAP Center and the lakhs watching from my motherland halfway across the world. In many countries the entire lifecycle of a patent application from application submission to grant is about two year, whereas in India it wouldn’t be surprising if it took double the time.

On Sunday, Mr. Modi participated in a town hall discussion with Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive. More than 70,000 people are expected to attend the welcome event.

“The Facebook of India is Facebook“.

This clearly reflects that Union Minister for Finance Arun Jaitley’s efforts under Mr Modi’s leadership have yielded desired results. What you need to do in a democracy is take a thousand little steps.

In this digital age, we have an opportunity to transform lives of people in ways that was hard to imagine just a couple of decades ago. Internet penetration was modest, mobile phone networks were glacially slow, and smartphones were a blip in a sea of basic phones. Our military ties are expanding, and we are building strategic convergences with it in the Indian Ocean and Asia-Pacific regions. Frank Wisner was USA ambassador to India.

We are now focussing on m-governance. This is the internet.org platform, now renamed as freeservices.org. All these issues and expectations were flagged by them to Modi. Earlier this year, the United Nations recognised same-sex marriages involving its officials and diplomats, putting India into a quandary over UN diplomats who are posted here and have gay partners. Indeed, he has nursed this constituency for long and it is only getting more and more enamoured of him.

Google, for example, wants 500 million Indians online by 2017. That will let Google expose these users to its other services, like search and YouTube, as well as plenty of ads. And so I went, and I travelled for nearly a month, and seeing the people, seeing how people connected, and having the opportunity to feel how much better the world could be if everyone had a stronger ability to connect, reinforced for me the importance of what we were doing.

Only one in six Indians knows enough English to surf the web in the language. In the 1980s, India would protest, without success, each time the USA supplied a major weapons system to Pakistan. “There are more web pages in Estonian than in Hindi”, Mr. Menon said. He is moving faster with the USA even though the US-Pakistan and US-China equations make the strategic picture complex. So far, 200 bikes equipped with solar-powered tablets and smartphones are on the road, and Google hopes to increase that number to 10,000. The unique India United States exhibition of Start Ups showcases products from 40 different companies.

Before you lash out at me – ask yourself the question: Who does a digital India even benefit? While India’s August PMI reading holds fairly steady at 52.3, indicating manufacturing expansion, China’s still remains in contraction territory at 47.3. The idea is to reposition Twitter as a real-time news service, instead of a collection of random items from random accounts. “It is a massive market, and Facebook and others see it”.