Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will meet key Government and industry leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and honchos at Bharti Group and Micromax, during his visit to India starting today.

Zuckerberg is expected to focus on ways to deliver more Internet services for people in languages other than English and talk about how Facebook and the various Indian stakeholderscan collaborate in taking Internet services to the next billion.

He comes to India just a few months after the company’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg’s visit in June. The social network has 108 million users in India, making it the second largest country after the US. In addition, there are millions of users on other products owned by Facebook, including WhatsApp and Instagram.

While the going has been good for Zuckerberg until now, it is the concerns around future growth that brings him to India.

According to a recent McKinsey report, there are about 4.4 billion people without Internet access and 3.4 billion of those live in 20 countries. In India, only 17 per cent of the population have access to the Internet.

Facebook has realised that it needs to do much more than being a social network to reach out to the next billion users, and has launched a number of initiatives such as the internet.org, aimed at bringing together all key stakeholders for making available affordable Internet services.

For example, the Internet.org application provides free basic services in markets where Internet access may be less affordable. It allows people to browse selected health, employment and local information websites without data charges. Initially launched to Airtel customers in Zambia, Zuckerberg would be keen to discuss possible partnerships with Airtel and Micromax to bring this initiative to India.

‘Mobile first’ At the centre of Facebook’s India game plan is the ‘mobile first’ strategy that the company announced globally a year ago. It is now offering services in many regional languages. For instance, it launched a programme called ‘Facebook for Every Phone’ app, which delivers smartphone-like Facebook experience on feature phones in Hindi and other Indian languages, including Gujarati, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Punjabi, Bengali and Marathi.

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