What can India expect from Satya Nadella’s visit as Donald Trump arrives

Microsoft launched its India operations in 1990 and for the past 30 years the company has played a major role in digital transformation of the country

With Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella all set to visit India next week — around the same time US President Donald Trump is making his first official visit to this part of the world — the software giant is looking forward to further consolidate its position in the country.

At a time when the Indian government is focused on digital transformation across sectors and modernise its IT infrastructure, Microsoft may take Satya Nadella‘s visit as an opportunity to showcase how it can help government achieve its goals across Cloud, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), smart cities, industrial automation and robotics etc.

“Government engagement is a major focus for Microsoft top management in India for the past two decades, and all the more now with expanding digital plans and also rising nationalist resistance to global digital and tech companies,” leading tech policy and media consultant Prasanto K. Roy told IANS.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has on several occasions stressed on the importance of leveraging emerging technologies like AI and ML to solve India’s critical problems.

The National Crime Records Bureau of the Ministry of Home Affairs, for example, is inviting bids from tech companies to build hardware and software infrastructure that can help the country fight crime with automated facial recognition system.

Amazon found selling clothes from factories other retailers blacklist

After a deadly 2013 factory collapse, most big US apparel companies agreed to steer clear of dangerous plants in Bangladesh. Not Amazon.

After a 2013 factory collapse killed more than 1,100 people in Bangladesh, most of the biggest U.S. apparel retailers joined safety-monitoring groups that required them to stop selling clothing from factories that violated certain safety standards. Amazon.com Inc. didn’t join. According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, the site today offers a steady stream of clothing from dozens of Bangladeshi factories that most leading retailers have said are too dangerous to allow into their supply chains.

A yellow gingham toddler top embroidered with flowers was among those clothes, listed on Amazon for $4.99 by a New York City retailer. The Journal traced the top to a factory in Chittagong, Bangladesh, that has no fire alarms and where doors are of a type managers can lock and keep workers in. A laborer at the factory, 18-year-old Nasreen Begum, said she spends 12-hour days there stitching shirts with 300 others. “You’re trapped inside until the time you complete the orders,” she said.

The Journal found other apparel on Amazon made in Bangladeshi factories whose owners have refused to fix safety problems identified by two safety-monitoring groups, such as crumbling buildings, broken alarms, and missing sprinklers and fire barriers. U.S. retailers such as Walmart Inc., Target Corp. , Costco Wholesale Corp. and Gap Inc. have agreed to honor bans imposed by those two groups, to have their supply chains inspected and to disclose to the groups the factories that supply them.

The Journal found clothing including pants, sweaters, clerical robes, fishnet body stockings and other items, that originate from blacklisted factories and end up on Amazon. Amazon has become a major player in apparel, a force with which other retailers must compete in a market where customers often seek the lowest price. It may have overtaken Walmart last year as Amer