India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi waves to the crowd at the Laxmi Narayan Hindu Temple in Surrey near Vancouver, British Columbia, April 16, 2015. Modi is visiting the United States West Coast. UPI/Heinz Ruckemann |
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SAN JOSE, Calif., Sept. 27 (UPI) -- India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi will again meet with the upper echelon of Silicon Valley on Sunday, hosting a town hall meeting at Facebook's sprawling campus and visiting Google headquarters.
On the second day of his whirlwind two-day visit to Silicon Valley, Modi, the first Indian leader to visit the United States West Coast in more than three decades, will field questions from some of Facebook's 1.5 billion users with 37,000 posting questions on the website already. He will then meet with Google CEO Sundar Pichai at the company's headquarters and visit Stanford University.
Modi will meet with California Gov. Jerry Brown late Sunday to discuss climate change, renewable energy and the digital economy and end the day speaking to a sold-out crowd at San Jose Convention Center.
The events come just hours after the notoriously charismatic Nodi praised the United States-India technology partnership and said he will continue working to connect more of the country to the Internet.
At the Digital India dinner on Saturday night, Modi highlighted how mobile phones have transformed his country, saying the government has recently partnered with Google to bring free WI-FI to 500 Indian railway stations.
"We want our 1.25 billion citizens to be digitally connected. We already have broadband usage across India go up by 63% last year. We need to accelerate this further," he said. "We have launched an aggressive expansion of the National Optical Fibre Network that will take broadband to our 600,000 villages. We will connect all schools and colleges with broadband. Building I-ways are as important as highways."
Monday, Modi will meet with President Obama after Obama's address to the United Nations General Assembly's inaugural session, a meeting that is being billed as a chance for the two leaders to strengthen ties and build on talks they had in January.
"We are deeply committed to strengthening the US-Indian relationship, building our economic and commercial ties, advancing our political and security cooperation in Asia and around the world," Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said.
