NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Thursday, November 17, 2016

Bill Gates, co-founder of American technology giant Microsoft is keen to partner with the Indian government for technology driven social projects such as e-health, e-agriculture and e-payment. Gates, who met union minister for communications and IT, Ravi Shankar Prasad in the capital on Thursday has also also evinced interest in partnering with start-ups that can provide these services to the bottom of the pyramid.

“Its very exciting times in India and some of these digital platform opportunities are quite amazing. The government has invested in manpower, it has invested in payment banks, and the payment infrastructure, so now is the case for building the applications on top of those, we need to work on the health issue, agriculture applications, etc,” said Gates after his meeting with Prasad.

He added that his foundation is very committed to working on some of these areas and their relationship with the ministry of electronics and IT will be a very critical task.

Prasad said that Gates knows India very well and is committed to partnering with the government. “I disclosed to him the entire architecture of Aadhaar, Aadhaar enabled payments that we have created, we also looked into digital health, and also gave him the whole outline of Digital India,” said Prasad.