Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to hold townhall at IIT Delhi later this month

BENGALURU: Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg will take questions from the Facebook community and a live audience at a townhall at IIT Delhi later this month. The townhall comes at a time when Facebook's ‘Free Basics’ initiative is witnessing scathing criticism from opposition leaders, government committees and netizens across the country, who argue that the initiative violates the principle of net neutrality. “More than 130 million people use Facebook in India. I'm looking forward to hearing directly from one of our most active and engaged communities,” Zuckerberg said on Facebook.

Zuckerberg will also meet with developers, partners and others who are building new digital services and working on ways to connect more people to them, a Facebook spokesperson told ET. This follows a month after Zuckerberg hosted Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a similar townhall session at the company's headquarters during Modi's visit to Silicon Valley. During the townhall session, Modi had hailed social media as a force for democracy and good governance, reiterated his vision of India as a $20-trillion economy and also said the ‘Make in India’ plan would be a success. The session will, however, be long remembered for Modi's emotional talk as he spoke about the hardships faced by his parents, especially his mother.

Zuckerberg also spoke of how, at a low point in Facebook's history, he visited a temple in India on the advice of his mentor Steve Jobs to reconnect with his vision of what he wanted Facebook to be.