Modi in Silicon Valley: Digital India gets cheers from American IT Czars

SAN JOSE (CALIFORNIA): India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi got a big thumps-up from Silicon Valley, the world’s largest tech hub and the breeding ground of innovation and entrepreneurship. Endorsing the ‘Digital India’ initiative, leading American CEOs in the IT sector described it as a vision that would bring India technologically at par with the rest of the world.

“Digital India will bring about solutions for the challenge of digital divide,” said Satya Nadella who became the first Indian origin CEO to head Microsoft. Speaking about empowering people from across the world, Mr Nadella said, “Let’s empower people from Nanyuki to Srikakulam”. He spoke about Skype for students between schools to exchange ideas. At the ‘Digital India’ dinner in San Jose, Mr Nadella announced Microsoft’s plans of cloud computing from data centers in India. Cloud computing is a model which enables the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or a personal computer. One can buy spaces in cloud computing to store and manage data. Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM are some of the tech giants who provide these services.

Mr. Modi has accelerated effort to make India the next driver in innovation, said Sunder Pichai, the Indian-origin CEO of Google. India is the fastest growing start-ups in the world, he added. Echoing, Mr Pichai, John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, described Mr. Modi as “amazing ambassador” of India. Mr. Chambers endorsed Digital India, saying it has the potential to bring about great changes in India. The US and India would be “very strong together under your leadership”, he said.

Bolstering investments for startups, Paul Jacobs executive chairman of Qualcomm announced USD 150 million funds to fuel innovation in Indian startups, apart from that he announcing Design India initiative and labs, saying it would help in ‘Make in India’ program.

India produces lakhs of engineers every year, but struggles to employ many of them as there aren’t enough jobs available to employ them despite the tech sector being one of the largest employers in the services sector in India. Mr Modi has emphasised on growth leading to jobs as his top priority.

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