The Silicon Valley nicknamed as the semiconductor manufacturing industries, computer industries concentrated in the San Francisco Bay in California is an area where the biggies of the tech industries are Indians. Approximately 12% of the momentous organisations like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Adobe and Tesla are Indians. The recent visit of Narendra Modi to the Silicon Valley had a amalgamation of protest and woo from the Indian Americans in California. The journey started off to bolster the use of Digital India and to understand the know-how of the start – ups operational in India and US. Why it’s easier to build start – ups in US and how can he employ a huge population of the country in the nearing future.
The start wasn’t great for Modi as there were some protests against him by the Indian professors and the Indian Americans who were fumed by the anti – Muslim riots that took place in Gujarat in 2002 and that left thousands of naïve and innocent dead. Many letters were directly written to the huge organisations to play it safe. But as the seven day trip progressed, the irate crowd subsided.
Hopes were high and fingers were crossed for a fortuitous outcome. Moments of humour was shared between the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and our Prime Minister, Narendra Modi where Facebook was conducting the elections every 5 minutes on recent topics on who’s right and who’s wrong and where our Indian election takes place only once in a year. Modi hailed how connected people are through Facebook. Mark finds India as an important country as he feels if everyone’s connected to the internet, an individual is employed. India is an inspiration to succeed in life in science and technology by visiting a temple in India, Mark asserted sharing his personal experience. Several questions were asked on subjects related to “Make in India” and also the rate of progress the country achieved in the last 15 months as the Prime Minister of India. Explaining the scenario in lay man terms of where the country was leading and how he had managed to get it on track was beautifully described to the people.
The reasons why it’s difficult to build your own start up and why it’s easier to do the same in US was shelfed. The mighty Indians in US and their dreams to build the start – ups in India and the hindrances they face were also elaborated. Modi also gave examples how their government had been working, and inspite of the banks being nationalised, who should work for the poor, in the last four decades a huge crunch of population, 60% of India didn’t have a bank account and in 100 days 180 million people had a bank account – exemplifying the speed of change.
Digital India is a project to reach the growth of digital technology in the country which is aimed to bring the Indian talent, Information Technology together so that we can make a better India Tomorrow. Its goal is to create a digital infrastructure, delivering government services electronically and create India a super power in manufacturing electronics which should reduce the electronics imports by 2020. The main requirements will be a Digital Identity, a Bank account and a Mobile phone so that this can be achieved. Indian government has planned to invest one lakh crore in this mega project which is expected to last till 2018. Every Indian should have a smart phone by 2019. All the agendas of Swachha Bharat Mission will be available on the Mobile App, digital locker system to minimise the paper documents and creating an e-document and securing it, eSign – a framework where you can sign documents by the Aadhar authentication, Online Registration System (ORS) for the hospitals in India, National Scholarship Portal for the efficient disbursal of scholarships to the students from Government, turning Highways to I-ways which would connect the 2.5 or 600,000 villages and Panchayats in India to the Information Technology.
To achieve all of this, India needs a strong and reliable National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) that should bear the usage of data and meeting the end user in almost all the villages. Google plans to enable Wi-Fi in 500 railway stations, Microsoft is planning to set up low cost broadband connection in five lakh villages and chip manufacturer Qualcomm is thinking of setting up a $150 million start up in India. The ideas are great and so are the desires of making our country the best among the powerful countries in the world. But the question is how reliable and successful will it be amongst the sea of economic troubles.
The Scribbled Writings 