New Delhi: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is on a two-day visit to India, the second biggest market for the social networking giant, addressed the first Internet.org summit on October 9 in New Delhi.
Addressing the summit, Zuckergberg said that more than one billion people don't have the Internet access in India and added that, he would be meeting the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday and would discuss how Indian villages could get access to the Internet.
Indicating what stops most of the users in India to access the Internet, Zuckerberg said, "Lack of relevant local language content is why most Indians don't use the Internet". This is what keeps the Internet restricted to a limited section of the society. To fill the gap, Facebook is working in rural India to improve Internet connectivity.
Emphasising the need of the Internet, Zuckberg said, when people are connected, accomplishments are easy; connected people have better access to technology, education and jobs.
Speaking at the summmit, Zuckerberg also highlighted a few interesting facts: 25 per cent fewer women are connected compared to men; 80 per cent of content on the Internet are just in 10 languages, while there are 22 official languages in India; 65 per cent of people use Facebook in a language other than English, including 10 Indian languages.
Zuckerberg is the third high profile CEO of a US-based corporation, after Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Micrsoft's Satya Nadella, to visit India in last few days.
In July, Facebook's Chief Operating Officer Sandberg visited India. She had met Modi, who has effectively used social networking during his election campaign and later even in governance.
'Internet.Org' aims to make Internet access affordable for people across the globe.
Focussed on enabling the next five billion people without Internet access to come online, the founding members of the project include Facebook, Ericsson, MediaTek, Nokia, Opera, Qualcomm and Samsung.
The partners are collaborating on developing lower-cost, higher-quality smartphones and deploying Internet access in under-served communities.
The Internet.org summit will bring together experts, officials and industry leaders to focus on ways to deliver more Internet services for people in languages other than English.
India is an important market for the social networking company. With over one billion users globally, the company gets over 100 million users from India. Many of these users log onto the website from their mobile devices.
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