Bill Gates is on his first tour of India since the Covid pandemic
Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar on Wednesday met billionaire philanthropist and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and the two discussed India stack and artificial intelligence.
Gates, who is the co-chair in Bill Gates and Melinda Gates Foundation, is on his first tour of India since the Covid pandemic.
The minister tweeted about the meeting, saying "Had an interesting conversation about the @India_Stack & Artificial Intelligence. He also handed me a signed copy of his book".
Meanwhile, Gates, while addressing a session on 'Building resilient and inclusive economies- the Promise of Digital Public Infrastructure', spoke about India's digital identity Aadhaar, its payment infrastructure, and rapid strides that the country has taken in bringing more people into formal banking system.
India's sprawling digital public infrastructure in fact received a glowing endorsement from the billionaire philanthropist as he praised the country's "great" digital network, reliable and low-cost connectivity, and said this will be the cheapest 5G market.
It is pertinent to mention that the minster has known the tech icon since the time he used to work with Intel Inc. in the mid-1980s.
Before making his foray into politics, Chandrasekhar had a three decades long career in the technology domain. After completing his Master's programme in computer science in 1986 from the Illinois Institute of Chicago, the first job offer that he received was from Microsoft Corporation which had by then become one of the leading technology companies in the US.
After spending a few years in the US working at Intel Inc. as a Senior Design Engineer and a CPU architect on the 80486 and Pentium Microprocessors, Chandrasekhar returned to India. He thereafter founded BPL Mobile in 1994, making it India's first mobile network operator.
The minister recalled how it was common to see Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Larry Ellison in the Intel company cafeteria sharing doughnuts and discussion.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)