Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg is holding a ‘town hall’ in IIT Delhi today.
You can watch the live streaming of the town hall event by clicking here.
Facebook has come under criticism from the Indian online community for trying to push its version of limited Internet to ‘underprivileged’ people in India.
The IIT Delhi event is the first town hall by Zuckerberg in India.
Zuckerberg delivered a 20-minute speech in Mandarin at Tsinghua University in China on Monday.
He said he hopes to get suggestions on how to make Facebook better in India.
Facebook received thousands of questions from users before the event. It has selected some of them to ask the questions live at the event.
India is seen as a lucrative opportunity for Facebook, with over 130 mln Facebook users, due to the country’s estimated 300 mln-strong middle class.
Zuckerberg said his company was focusing on India as there are millions of people in the country who do not have access to data and information.
“For every ten people who get connected to the Internet, one person gets a job, or a job is created,” he said. He also said that Indians have ideas that need to be shared with the wider world and increasing connectivity would help in this. “If we can play a role in either of those things…”
He said Facebook’s app — Internet.org — has given the ‘Internet’ to 15 mln people in the world. Over 1 mln of these users are in India. (It should be noted that Internet.org does not give access to the Internet, but only to a handful of websites.)
He said Facebook wants to develop computers that can “see better, hear better, translate and understand human language better” by its efforts in artificial intelligence.