Digital India dinner yields tech policy wins for Team Modi

Among the strategic policy announcements made at the Digital India dinner here in honour of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Silicon Valley, Qualcomm Incorporated boss Paul Jacobs announced his company’s support for the Government of India’s Digital India and Make in India agenda by establishing a $150 million India-specific Venture Fund formed exclusively to fuel innovation and foster promising Indian start-ups that were contributing to the mobile and “Internet of everything” ecosystem.
The fund would also provide start-ups with financial, marketing, technology and business support to help propel them forward in the competitive Indian market, Qualcomm officials noted.
Second, Mr. Jacobs introduced a Design in India Initiative and Competition that he said was designed to encourage the creation of a local product design ecosystem and would help make India a hub for design capabilities that drive the manufacturing value chain for 3G/4G smartphones, and tablets.
A critical investment that would accompany these steps would be the creation of a Qualcomm Innovation Lab in Bangalore to provide technical and engineering support to Indian companies, and support multiple Indian mobile device design companies.
If Mr. Jacobs’ announcement came close to stealing the show, Google’s Chennai-born CEO Sundar Pichai was not to be outdone as he promised that next month the Internet search giant would announce a new approach to vernacular language typing.
Mr. Pichai said, “Android is today available in many Indic languages but we know that to push digital literacy forward it is really important for people to be able to type in Indian languages. So next month we will make it possible for people to type in ten Indic languages in India, including the Prime Minister’s mother tongue, Gujarati.”
Further, Mr. Pichai noted, on Sunday he and Mr. Modi would unveil an important announcement regarding bringing connectivity, likely broadband via hotspots, to all railway stations in India.
The two CEOs joined Microsoft head Satya Nadella and new USIBC Chairman John Chambers not only in praising the commitment of Mr. Modi and his government to transforming India’s technological, innovation and entrepreneurship landscapes, but also highlighting numerous ways in which Indians were already tapping into a wealth of opportunities afforded to them owing to Internet access.
Among these, Mr. Nadella said, Microsoft was working on using its technological edge for everything from helping fishermen in Tamil Nadu, to aiding in the delivery of healthcare services and diagnostics in rural India, and even bringing Sesame Street to children via mobiles.
He too had an announcement to throw into the fray, Microsoft’s proposal next week to make available its own cloud services operating out of Indian data centres, which he described as a “key milestone” in the context of Digital India and Make in India.

http://www.thehindu.com/news/nation...or-team-modi/article7694668.ece?homepage=true

The nation of 356 million young men and women rekindled hope for a new India when it took to streets in the aftermath of the Nirbhaya incident. Thousands of beating hearts sieved sparkling thoughts and ideas from an archaic system and infused new blood into the nation’s veins. The world took note of it and anticipated a sea change in the world’s largest democracy. Media was abuzz with positive stories about this Young India, an India which was seen revolting against the medieval Bharat that stood on a caste-class-gender-faith divide. The spontaneous upsurge of sentiments and emotions over the brutal gangrape and murder of a young girl in the nation’s capital indeed held promise for a tectonic shift in the country’s polity. However, it’s perhaps one of India’s biggest ironies that things are as they were three years ago.

Where have the young, exuberant and argumentative Indians gone when the country is virtually being taken over by neo-conservative, semi-modern bigots? Why Jantar Mantar, India Gate and Rajpath so silent? If the brutal murder of a young girl in the national capital could release the pent-up anger of the whole nation, why is there not a single demonstration over the barbaric killing of an innocent man on the outskirt of the capital city? If young India was shaken and stirred by the Nirbhaya incident, why is it now not moved by the plight of a young soldier whose father was lynched by a group of blood-thirsty fanatics? Why is all the anger and frustration confined to the walls and handles of Facebook and Twitter and not spilling onto streets?
Perhaps the young India of 2012 is getting too old to question the present system, which is reinvesting the Bharat of yore. Or perhaps it is so mesmerised by the magic of Digital India that “sporadic incidents” of hate crime does not bother it anymore. Maybe the youths are lured by the dollar dream that PM Modi has shown them through his US visit. But, once they wake from deep slumber, they will realize that Digital India cannot survive in a divisive India and that the world cannot be won just by a pep talk.

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I don't understand how this "Digital India" or "Make in India" will ensure roti, kapdaa aur makaan for the poorest sections in India. Will it grow more foodgrains, for example?