An App Won’t Solve India’s Bloated Bureaucracy Problem
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is an unabashed technophile. He has proved himself an effective user of social media and has no hesitation embracing snazzy tech toys, like the Tupac-at-Coachella-style holographic projections that he used during his 2014 election campaign. He has 30 million likes on his Facebook page, and he has more than 15 millionTwitter followers, behind only U.S. President Barack Obama and Pope Francis among world leaders. He launched Digital India, a number of interrelated programs to make India more wired and his citizens more tech-savvy. And he has a deserved reputation as an early adopter — or at least as someone hip to the technology the kids are using these days. An official Chinese video explaining the importance of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a Chinese-led multilateral grouping of which India is a member, depicted an animated Modi using a selfie stick.
His Sept. 26 to Sept. 27 visit to Silicon Valley, then, seems like a natural way for Modi to shine. He will meet privately with the CEOs of Apple, Facebook, Google, Tesla, and Adobe, and he will participate in a Facebook town-hall question-and-answer event that’s sure to be hugely popular. He will also deliver a speech at San Jose’s SAP Center — home of the NHL’s San Jose Sharks — to a standing-room-only audience, many of them Indian-American information technology professionals.
