ANAND MAHINDRA WANTS TO FUND INDIA’S RIVAL TO FACEBOOK

At the time when Facebook is under scrutiny for alleged data breach, Anand Mahindra ( pictured), chairman of the Mahindra Group, in a tweet, suggested it could be time for India to have its own social network. He even offered to back good ideas with seed capital.

“Beginning to wonder if it’s time to consider having our own social networking company that is very widely owned, professionally managed and willingly regulated. Any relevant Indian start-ups out there? If any young teams have such plans, I’d like to see if I can assist with seed capital,” Mahindra wrote on Twitter on Monday.

By Tuesday morning, Mahindra’s tweet was greeted with hundreds of responses with suggestions and pitches for their own start-ups. Among the suggestions was one from Jaspreet Bindra, senior vice-president of Digital Transformation at Mahindra, who suggested a blockchain-enabled social network could be a great idea.

Mahindra quickly roped in Bindra to help him review the flurry of ideas pouring in. Known to kick off storms on Twitter with his humorous, inspirational and opinionated tweets, Mahindra is one of the most candid Indian industrialists on the platform. Even Union Minister of Law and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad tweeted in support of Mahindra’s idea. Prasad had last week threatened Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg India would take action against the firm, if it was found the firm was involved in swaying any Indian election results like in the Cambridge Analytica scam.

“Thank you all for the flood of responses, suggestions & proposals. Please copy your tweets to my colleague @j_bindra (Jaspreet Bindra), who will work with me on this exploration. If nothing else, it should be fun…” he said on Twitter on Tuesday.