Yesterday on the day-2 of his maiden visit to India, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg met Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi and Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Ravi Shankar Prasad.
A message was later posted on PM Modi’s website, saying “they discussed a wide range of issues revolving around the innovative use of Facebook as a platform to engage with a large audience in the service of humanity.”
In the talks that happened between Zuckerberg and the PM, and between the IT Minister and Zuckerberg, they talked about digital India, clean India drive and on security concerns too.
Here are things they talked about and things we can expect in coming months –
Contribution in Digital India Initiative
PM has asked Zuckerberg to identify some domains of Digital India where Facebook can get involved in the initiative and help. He asked Facebook to look at how to enhance Internet literacy along with Internet connectivity.
The IT Minister talked to Zuckerberg about PMs dream of ‘Government on Mobile’. He mentioned that there is a great opportunity for Facebook to harness the potentials in the fields of e-Commerce, e-Health, e-Education, sanitation and cleanliness drive and such other emerging areas.
Zuckerberg on his timeline posted about his meeting with the PM and said “there are more than one billion people in India who don’t have access to the Internet. Prime Minister Modi and I both believe that connectivity can help transform lives and communities across India, and we had a productive discussion about how to collaborate on this through his Digital India initiative and Internet.org.”
Contribution in NOFN project
A contribution from Facebook the the NOFN Project (National Optical Fibre Network) project which works on IT infrastructural development in the country.
This Government Project is a plan to connect all the 2,50,000 Gram panchayats in the country. This will be done by utilizing existing fibres of PSUs (BSNL, Railtel and Power Grid) and laying incremental fibre to connect to Gram Panchayats wherever necessary.
The project is funded by the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF),for which funds are raised through a ‘Universal Access Levy (UAL)’ levied as a percentage of revenue earned by the operators under various licenses, under the, under the Telecom Policy, 1999.
Drone pilot project in Seemandhra
The company was interested in doing a pilot of its Internet beaming drones in the newly created state Seemandhra. According t a report in The Economic Times today, Zuckerberb shared the interest with PM.
The company will start beaming Internet (pilot test) from sky via Drones using Wi-Fi next year. A detailed paper ‘Connecting the World from the Sky’ appeared in September last week revealing the growth of the Internet.org project of Facebook. READ – Drones to beam Internet in 2015 as Facebook Internet.org will enter Test-mode
READ Detailed report here
Tech Khabaren 