New Delhi: Union Minister of State for Electronics and IT, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, in March met Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and had a “good, interesting conversation about India Stack and Artificial Intelligence (AI)”.

During the meeting at the office of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in New Delhi, Gates also presented Chandrasekhar a copy of his book, titled “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster”, which he signed as “Thanks Rajiv for our work together”.

Gates, Co-Chair in Bill Gates and Melinda Gates Foundation, is on his first tour of India since the Covid pandemic. Chandrasekhar had known Gates since the time when he used to work with Intel in the mid-1980s.

Before making his foray into politics, Chandrasekhar had a three decades’ long career in the technology domain. After completing his Master’s programme in Computer Science in 1986 from the Illinois Institute of Chicago, the first job offer Chandrasekhar received was from Microsoft, which had by then become one of the leading technology companies in the US.

The Minister recalled how it was common to see Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or Larry Ellison in the Intel company cafeteria sharing doughnuts and discussions. After spending a few years in the US working at Intel as a Senior Design Engineer and a CPU architect on the 80486 and Pentium Microprocessors, Chandrasekhar returned to India.

He founded BPL Mobile in 1994, making it India’s first mobile network operator.