Outcomes of Modi’s Visit to the U.S.

Ashna Contractor (AC): Hello and welcome to this Gateway House podcast. I’m Ashna Contractor and with me today, joining us from the U.S. is Nish Acharya. He is a visiting fellow at Gateway House for India-U.S. studies and he is also the author of ‘The India-U.S. Partnership: $1 Trillion by 2030’, which is under publication. So Nish, Narendra Modi has just completed his visit to Silicon Valley. He met with a number of major technology companies there such as Facebook and Google and he addressed the Indian American community in San Jose as well. Much was said about the fact that Modi is the first Indian prime minister to go to Silicon Valley after over 30 years. A number of important announcements have come out of this visit. For example, Google has said that they will bring wireless internet to over 500 railway stations across India, Microsoft has plans to provide low cost broadband to 5 lakh villages in India and Qualcomm has announced a fund for startups in India and a couple of other announcements as well. So my first question to you is – what do you think the Silicon Valley visit meetings meant and what are some of the key takeaways and highlights, according to you, from this visit?

Nishith Acharya (NA): I think that the visit was successful in that it achieved two critical objectives for the prime minister. The first being this continuation of engagement of the diaspora. The prime minister has gone around the world, whether it’s London or Toronto or New York, South East Asia etc. and he’s mobilised the diaspora. San Francisco, one could argue, is the most important new diaspora location because of Silicon Valley. So he continued to mobilise and energise and pay homage to the contributions of the diaspora. I think that was very important for him to continue to do because the diaspora can do a lot for India but somebody needs to mobilise and energise them particularly, and he did that.

The second thing is, he positioned India and his leadership as understanding technology and understanding the global economy. People know about India’s tech industry, but particularly in Silicon Valley, there’s a question about whether India’s tech industry has kept up with the times and whether India’s startup culture is something just limited to Bangalore, Hyderabad and Gurgaon or if actually the government gets it and others get it. So I think the time he spent at Facebook – clearly the personal comfort he had with Mark Zuckerberg, the time he spent with the others – those really showed him to be a savvy politician who not just speaks well but understands these things. And then laying out some of the ideas around ‘Digital India’, JAM (Jan Dhan Yojana, Aadhaar card and Mobile governance) – as he mentioned in his speech yesterday. I think all of that is very important to getting the word out about what he’d like to see done in India and the role of technology as a vehicle to empower people.

AC: As you mentioned, talking about ‘Digital India’ was really high on his agenda and putting an image of India as a technology hub or at least a place that can be a technology hub. So what do you think are some of the key areas in which the U.S. can contribute towards ‘Digital India’? Do you think ‘Digital India’ as a programme can really reach its full potential following this visit?

NA: I understand why he announced ‘Digital India’. But I think only one of those announcements was actually a big deal and that was the Microsoft announcement to touch 5 lakh villages. I don’t think the other announcements – Qualcomm was going to do this anyway, Facebook has been looking to be in India and engage for a while, Google is doing 500 Wi-Fi centres but that’s not particularly hard. So I think the Microsoft announcement was the significant one. But overall, I think his ‘Digital India’ programme was interesting. He announced the JAM – financial services, unique ID and mobile governance – as the core of his programming. And he’s always talked about increasing broadband penetration and smart cities. These are all things where the United States is the leader. So the question will be, how do you engage – for broadband connectivity, for platform development – how do you allow American companies to participate while addressing concerns about national security and building your local industry – which are legitimate. So for the big companies side, that’s going to be a big deal. I think the bigger issue is going to be – how do you bring in new players that can keep the cost low.

I’m working with a group out of MIT – they’re technology skill is going to be much cheaper than Microsoft or Google in terms of technology for the crowd. So how does a start up like that get the opportunity to compete and bring the most cutting edge technology to India at a low cost that the base of the pyramid can afford. So I think the announcements were great. I think the visit was much more marketing than substance in that sense. But let’s see if he can show progress next year on these three – financial inclusion, aadhaar and mobile governance. He’s shown that he’s brought in the best companies in the world from Silicon Valley and elsewhere to work on that in terms of building infrastructure, then I think it will be a success. But right now, a lot of people look at this as just the second year of a lot of announcements so let’s see where this actually goes.

AC: Right, exactly. So I guess now going forward it’s all about implementation and execution of a lot of these announcements. So now that the visit is done, what do you think will really be needed in terms of concrete steps going forward to really build that ecosystem of innovation or of the Silicon Valley culture in India that we’ve been talking about? What does the prime minister really need to do in terms of action points, going forward?

NA: In the book we talk about the ‘Silicon Swadesh’, which is a little bit different from ‘Digital India’, in that the idea was that India needs to develop its own start up culture, outside of the three cities that I mentioned – Bangalore, Gurgaon and Hyderabad. It has 52 cities with over a million people. These are all major metropolitan areas where the start up culture needs to come. And that’s the biggest thing that the diaspora can be engaged with and Silicon Valley can be engaged with, because they inherently know how to do it well and can build those characteristics. So I think, unfortunately, he missed that part of it. The line that the prime minister and India tried to promote is that we already have a start up culture, and I think that that’s not the case entirely. It’s still limited to pockets. And so, I wish he had spent a little bit more time thinking about how to bring the culture to India, bring philanthropy, bring venture capital, bring all of that to build the start up culture. But I think some of that will happen anyway.

Now people, I think, will want to see execution. He announced ‘Make in India’ last year – is there a chance for new technologies from Silicon Valley, like 3D printing or advanced manufacturing processes, robotics – is there a role for those companies in ‘Make in India’? If we talk about ‘Digital India’, will American tech companies have a chance to compete for the hardware projects in India, the infrastructure, fiber optic highways – those sorts of things that the prime minister talks about when he says “smart cities”. Smart grid technology – will the IT companies that are very good at solar and smart grid here – will they be allowed to build a presence in India? Even ‘Swachh Bharat’, which he announced last year to clean India – there are so many new technologies to make waste management more efficient, re-utilise it for agriculture. There are so many technologies around air pollution and things of that nature – better filters etc. And so, in a certain sense, I think he missed an opportunity to come and say – “we announced Swachh Bharat and we’ve introduced these 10 new innovations that have helped move it along, we’ve cleaned the Ganga River etc.” And so I wish he’d given a little bit of a progress report on ‘Make in India’, ‘Swachh Bharat’ and all these other initiatives, and connected it to innovation. Because then I think the message would have been – we’re actually moving forward and getting things done and we’re using technology. And I think that would have resonated really strongly with the Silicon Valley crowd. Because I’m afraid that today he’s left, and the excitement is done and there will be no follow up in anybody’s mind.

AC: Thank you, Nish. So really looking forward there’s a lot to keep an eye out for. We really hope that all of this materialises and we see some progress on the tech partnership between India and the U.S. We will hear from you again soon on this topic. Thank you for joining us.

NA: Great, thank you so much