Nadella, Pichai to visit India in December

Two of the top India-born chief executive officers (CEOs) heading tech firms would be visiting India later this month. While Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella would be undertaking a personal trip, he is scheduled to spend a day with the start-ups at the T-hub, a start-up incubation centre in Hyderabad. Google CEO Sundar Pichai would be on an official visit. For Pichai, who became CEO of the internet search giant in August, this would be his first visit to India after assuming the charge.

In addition to meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whom he hosted at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, Pichai would announce a number of initiatives on 16 December. The measures would be targeted primarily for India, as part of the Digital India  initiative, Business Standard reported citing top company sources.

Chennai-born Pichai would officially launch Google's Wi-Fi initiatives for India in partnership with RailTel, a unit of Indian Railways that provides broadband services. He would also launch several Google products designed for India.

During the prime minister's Silicon Valley visit in September this year, Google had announced free Wi-Fi services at over 400 railway stations across the country, using the underlying optic fibre network of RailTel. The first phase, the company had said, would see Wi-Fi availability at 100 stations by the end of 2016. ''This will rank it as the largest public Wi-Fi project in India, and among the largest in the world, by number of potential users,'' Pichai had written in a blog post.

Meanwhile, it was not yet decided whether Nadella would meet chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao as the CM would be busy in an another programme from 23 December 27 December.

''Satya Nadella is coming on December 28. He is visiting T-Hub. We are planning to inaugurate some of our initiatives during that time. We are also inviting some other dignitaries. He (Nadella) promised to spend a couple of hours at the T-Hub. He is on private visit,''  said Kalvankula Taraka Rama Rao, IT minister, Telangana, www.tecake.com reported.

Nadella's visit would boost the government's plans for making Hyderabad a startup capital of India. T-Hub, a 70,000 square feet uniquely designed facility was built at a cost of nearly 40 crore. It was built by the state government in collaboration with IIIT-Hyderabad, Indian School of Business (ISB) and NALSAR University of Law. T-Hub currently hosts over 130 startups.