It’s another 12 days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrives in California’s famed Silicon Valley, but the Bay Area is already agog with excitement and expectation.
The SAP Centre in San Jose is all set for a virtual repeat of the iconic Madison Square Garden event a year ago, with more than 45,000 Indian-Americans registering for admission to the 18,500-seat arena that also goes by the nickname of “Shark Tank”.
For Modi it will be something more as he makes a major push for his recently-launched “Digital India” initiative to expand internet access, boost electronics manufacturing and develop apps to improve the delivery of Government services.
The Prime Minister will be visiting the Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park on September 27 for a town hall-style event. He is also slated to visit Googleplex, the home of tech giant Google in Mountain View, and electric car maker Tesla’s plant in Fremont.
Given that Modi has more Facebook followers than any political leader except President Barack Obama, and that India has the second highest number of Facebook users after the US, Zuckerberg’s outreach to the Indian leader may be pretty obvious, yet highly significant.
Indian techies, start-ups and venture capitalists are enthused no end. “It’s symbolic that there is finally a government in India that understands technology and innovation are critical to India,” Venktesh Shukla, president of Silicon Valley branch of TiE, also known as The Indus Entrepreneurs, told the San Jose Mercury News.
Shukla believes the visit allows Modi to build relationships with tech firms that want to invest in India, while also fostering support from the Bay Area’s influential Indian-American community. Even as California’s tech giants prepare to roll out the “silicon carpet” for Modi, a veritable battle is raging among Indian-American academics supporting or opposing the Prime Minister’s Digital India initiative.
While about 130 Indian-American professors from major US universities issued an open letter raising privacy and transparency concerns and criticized the tech giants for receiving Modi with “uncritical fanfare”, another group of 150-odd academics lauded the PM’s initiative. The pro-Modi group of academics said in their statement that the Digital India project “heralds a new age of participatory democracy and enhances transparency in governance in India, levelling the playing field for vast numbers of India’s citizens”.