 "Minister for Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad meets Bill Gates, co-founder, Microsoft and Minister of Electronics and Information Technology P P Chaudhary in New Delhi (Pic: Dalip Kumar)")
Aiming to work with the Indian government on various issues, including e-payments, digital health, digital literacy and e-agriculture in India, Bill Gates, US business magnate, philanthropist and Microsoft founder met Minister of Information Technology, Law and Justice Ravi Shankar Prasad. From cyber security to social issues, Gates wants to partner with the Indian government on a number of initiatives.
The meeting, which went on for 45 minutes, was attended by senior officers of the IT ministry as well as Gates and members of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Sources said Gates was interested in getting into the business of e-payments in India as he wants to streamline the digital payments system for economically weaker sections in India. Industry experts said Microsoft was anyway providing back-end support to a number of payments bank in India, which are set to launch in the next few months. The ministry has requested the foundation to be part of the digitising process.
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Reviewing the Digital India programme, Gates after the meeting said the Foundation is keen on working in various areas along with the government. “It’s a very exciting time in India and some of these digital platform opportunities are really quite amazing. The government has invested manpower and the payments banks and payment infrastructure. It is now a case of building the applications on top of those. We need to work on health issues, health applications. Our Foundation is committed to working on those areas – relationship with this ministry will be very critical for us,” Gates said.
Gates also discussed issues around cyber security. Microsoft has already set up a cyber security engagement centre (CSEC) in the Delhi-NCR region that helps to respond to cyber threats in the country. Sources said Gates wants to increase collaboration with the Indian government on these issues.
Specific to health in India, Gates went on to say that there is a question of having a health record, what it looks like and how one can ensure it is standardised and kept private. “There is a lot of experiences around the world and with great efficiency, having a health record will be important,” Gates added.
Sources also said Gates is interested to be a partner in the digital village scheme, where the government has identified 1,000 villages for digital education. Gates told the ministry that the foundation wants to work with start-ups, which can build applications and value-added services for Aadhaar and UPI. The ministry would identify such start-ups and refer them to the Foundation.
“We had a very profitable meeting, Bill Gates is a true friend of India. He is working enormously in India through his Foundation. It was exciting to hear his deep interest for digital payments in India and also digital health. I disclosed to him the entire nature of Aadhaar-enabled payments on other platforms and also digital health, and also gave him an outline of entire digital India programme,” said Prasad.
