E-social projects big draw for Bill Gates

NEW DELHI: Bill Gates, cofounder of technology giant Microsoft, is keen to partner with the Indian government for technology-driven social projects such as e-health, e-agriculture and epayment banking on the infrastructure built by Aadhaar.

Gates, who met union minister for communications and IT, Ravi Shankar Prasad in the capital on Thursday, has also evinced interest in partnering with startups that can provide these services to the bottom of the pyramid.

"It's 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 said his foundation is committed to working on some of these areas and the Aadhaar infrastructure, which has been laid out, will enable several linkages such as electronic health records. Prasad said 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," said Prasad.