PM Modi to win West with star-studded business meetings

A galaxy of super-rich chief executives, techies, entrepreneurs, investors with global giant companies like Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Adobe are lined up to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his two day trip to Silicon Valley on September 26-27. This firmament of business does not include some 35 chief executive officers of manufacturing companies and financial institutions who have a date with Modi during a ‘Make in India’ event in New York after he touches down late on September 23. The West Coast theme is ‘Innovative Entrepreneurship, Digital Economy and Renewable Energy’.

Updated on: Sep 13, 2015, 18:02:34 IST

Hindustan Times | By Shishir Gupta, New Delhi

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A galaxy of super-rich chief executives, techies, entrepreneurs, investors with global giant companies like Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Adobe are lined up to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his two day trip to Silicon Valley on September 26-27. This firmament of business does not include some 35 chief executive officers of manufacturing companies and financial institutions who have a date with Modi during a ‘Make in India’ event in New York after he touches down late on September 23. The West Coast theme is ‘Innovative Entrepreneurship, Digital Economy and Renewable Energy’.

Diplomatic sources confirm that John T Chambers, executive chairman of $47-billion CISCO Technology, Satya Nadella, CEO of $93-billion Microsoft, Paul Jacobs of $27-billion Qualcomm, $66-billion Google’s top honchos Eric Schmidt and Sundar Pichai, ex-Google billionaire Ram Shriram, and Shantanu Narayen, CEO of $5-billion Adobe Systems, will meet Modi on the West Coast.

Modi will also meet Silicon Valley’s hi-tech billionaire entrepreneurs like Romesh Wadhwani of Symphony Technology Group, Venktesh Shukla of Monta Vista Capital and Naren Gupta of Integrated Systems.

The Prime Minister is also slated to visit Tesla Headquarters in Palo Alto in California and meet one of the co-founders of the next generation US automotive and energy storage companies. Modi may miss meeting Elon Musk, Tesla’s founder and CEO, as he is believed to be away from the US during that time. From these stratospheric technologies companies and entrepreneurs, the Prime Minister may interact with Dr Manu Prakash of Stanford, who is a ‘frugal science’ innovator whose 50-cent microscopes have been sold across Asia and Africa.

South Block sources said the India show kickstarts in Washington with India-US strategic commercial dialogue on September 20-21 with external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj, commerce and industry minister Nirmala Sitharaman, power and renewable energy ministry Piyush Goyal interacting with their US counterpart in order to cement the bilateral relationship.

After addressing the UN Sustainable Development Summit in New York on September 25, Modi has a hectic programme on the West Coast with an address to Indian diaspora at San Jose auditorium. Through innovative entrepreneurship, the PM wants to bring the experience of Silicon Valley start-ups to India without the downside.

“The PM is keen on interacting with the US techies on digital economy which is changing the face of business and trade, for instance, how Uber has changed the transportation landscape. Prime Minister Modi is interested in renewable energy as this could be India’s answer to Climate change. While Boeing Chairman wanted Modi to come to its headquarters in Seattle, CEO of Textron Inc, which manufactures Bell Helicopters, Cessna and Beechcraft, has also placed a request to meet the Prime Minister. The focus of the Prime Minister’s West Coast trip is on leapfrogging the Indian economy through latest technology,” said an Indian diplomat.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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