File photo of Mark Zuckerberg. (Reuters)
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi today. He said yesterday that his social media network wants to help Mr Modi connect remote villages of India to the Internet.
India, Mr Zuckerberg said, had only around 243 million of its people currently online and about a billion people not connected - a huge waste of potential, he said, with the whole world robbed of their ideas and creativity. "We believe that connectivity is a human right... it cannot just be the privilege of the rich ad powerful," he said at a conference in New Delhi on Thursday.
Mr Zuckerberg said he was excited about Mr Modi's Digital India initiative. "He is committed to connecting villages online and we are excited to see how Facebook can help," he said.
Apart from Mr Modi, the Facebook CEO also met Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad today. After the meeting, the telecom minister said that Mr Zuckerberg is keen to play a significant role in India and that they discussed alternate technologies for providing connectivity to rural areas.
The 30-year-old Facebook CEO is on a two-day visit to India aimed at promoting the internet.org app, which allows people in underdeveloped areas to access basic online services. This is his first visit to India.
The government is expected bring up how the social networking giant can help in promoting its campaigns on education and empowerment of the girl child, against female foeticide and the ambitious Ganga clean-up plan.
Sources said it is also likely to ask Mr Zuckerberg to promote Hindi on his social networking site.
Mr Zuckerberg said Facebook was now focusing on content in local languages. "Since 2007, Facebook has been working on new apps and services in local languages. About 65 per cent use Facebook in a language other than English, including 10 Indian languages," he said.
He announced yesterday that Facebook is creating a $1 million fund to help developers develop apps for farmers, migrants and women. This will be a contest to drive new apps and services in local languages.
Mark Zuckerberg is the third high profile CEO of a US-based firm, after Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Microsoft's Satya Nadella, to visit India in the last few days.