Silicon Valley bigwigs listened intently as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid out his vision of Digital India in the ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel. Sundar Pichai of Google, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, John Chambers of Cisco and Shantanu Narayan of Adobe shared the stage with the Prime Minister, who said, “Digital India is an enterprise for the transformation of India in a scale model unmatched in human history. Nothing else will do in a country with 800 million impatient youths waiting for change.”
Prime Minister called Facebook, Twitter and Instagram the new neighbourhoods of our world. He mentioned that digital vocabulary had reached even the remotest villages in his native state of Gujarat, and almost in a lighter vein, said that the most fundamental debate for our youth is the choice between Android, iOS or Windows.
In the present digital world, he said that your status is defined not by whether you are awake or asleep, it is whether you are online or offline. He also observed that with the information revolution, Google has made our teachers and grandparents idle. He said that with the help of technology, we have an opportunity to transform lives of people in ways that was hard to imagine just a couple of decades ago.
“I want our 1.25 billion citizens to be digitally connected,” he said, describing the steps taken by his government towards broadband connectivity. The PM added, “I see technology as a means to empower and as a tool that bridges the distance between hope and opportunity.”