Mark Zuckerberg

The 32-years-old co-founder of Facebook has made two trips to India since Modi became the prime minister.

In October 2015, Zuckerberg met Modi in New Delhi and expressed his interest in working with the Indian government in areas like healthcare and education. He also offered to help in developing the Clean India mobile app. Modi and Zuckerberg had also discussed the possibilities of using social media to check terrorist activities.

At the time, Facebook was trying to push its free, limited internet service, Free Basics, in India. The topic also came up during Modi’s visit to the Silicon Valley where he was hosted at Facebook’s headquarters.

However, in February 2015, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India ruled in favour of net neutrality and effectively killed Facebook’s Free Basics in the country.

Sundar Pichai

The Chennai-born CEO of Google met Modi in Silicon Valley in September 2015. Pichai had extended a welcome to the Indian prime minister in a two-minute video message ahead of Modi’s visit. In the video, Pichai said that India and the Valley shared a strong bond.

“There is tremendous excitement for your visit amongst all Googlers,” and the broader Indian community, he said.

Later that year, Pichai made his first official trip to India as the CEO of Google and visited Modi in Delhi.

India is of great interest to companies like Google because the country still has only 20% internet penetration and has more open internet policy as compared to China.

Jack Ma

Tech leaders from the US are not the only ones to have wooed Modi.

In May 2015, Jack Ma, the chairman of China’s Alibaba, had met with Modi in New Delhi.

Three months after Ma’s visit, Indian e-commerce major Snapdeal raised $500 million from investors including Alibaba Group Holding, Foxconn and SoftBank Corp. Alibaba has been looking to participate in India’s booming e-commerce space, and reports have said that the company is interested in having a direct presence in the country.

Masayoshi Son

In October 2014, Masayoshi Son, chairman and CEO of Japanese telecommunications giant SoftBank, visited Modi in India.

Softbank has aggressively ramped up its presence in India over the recent years and has ploughed in over $2 billion in the country so far. The group holds stakes in some of the leading Indian technology startups like Snapdeal, Ola, and OYO Rooms.

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