Mark Zuckerberg and Narendra Modi will meet later this month. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who will be speaking at the Internet.org summit in India on October 9th and 10th will also sit down with Prime Minister Narendra Modi to talk about Swachh Bharat, his Clean India initiative in honor of Mahatma Gandhi.
The Mark Zuckerberg and Narendra Modi meeting will occur next week when the Facebook CEO visit New Delhi for the second annual summit of Internet.org.
Zuckerberg is the keynote speaker at the event, which was launched in 2013 by Facebook in collaboration with six mobile phone companies Samsung, Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera Software, and Qualcomm.
Internet.org’s main goal is to improve Internet access for five billion people around the world.
Zuckerberg and Modi have plans to focus on the Prime Minister’s Swachh Bharat (Clean India) campaign, which will be launched on October 2nd at Boat Club area on Rajpath in New Delhi.
Modi who is a big fan of Zuckerberg is hoping that the young billionaire will help promote or even donate to his Swachh Bharat campaign.
On Thursday, more than 5000 students and government officials will take part in Swachh Bharat campaign, which has the goal to clean the streets, roads and infrastructure of the country by the 2nd of October 2019, 150th birthday of Mahatma Gandhi.
Modi is urging the nation and his officials “to clean – including toilets – pick up a broom” during Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary.
Zuckerberg and Modi will also discuss the need of developing lower-cost, higher-quality smartphones and giving Internet access to underserved non-English speaking communities.
Additionally, Modi and Zuckerberg will look at ways to use the internet to attract more tourists to the country.
A spokesperson for the Indian government has declined to comment on the rumors that Zuckerberg and Modi will partner on his pet initiatives.
Modi who brilliantly used Facebook to reach most of its 77.8 million Indian users (the number is expected to reach 108.9 million users by the end of 2014) during his election campaign in the spring met Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg in July.
With the news that India is expected to be the second-largest Internet market by 2017, internet moguls are flocking to the country.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Micrsoft’s Satya Nadella, visited India in the last few days and met with Modi.
Modi who is also working with Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation spoke to Sundar Pichai, the Google executive who oversees Android, Chrome and Google Apps last month.
