Zuck sidesteps tough questions on second India visit

“Nobody’s perfect,” explained Mark Zuckerberg today at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi. “We’ve made a lot of mistakes and will continue to do so.”

After touring the Taj Mahal yesterday, Zuckerberg today conducted a quick question and answer session at IIT Delhi, one of the country’s top universities. The school’s alumni include Flipkart co-founders Sachin and Binny Bansal and Vinod Khosla, the founder of Sun Microsystems. This is Zuckerberg’s second visit to the country this year.

“It is even more stunning than I expected. It’s incredible what people can build — and what love can motivate us to build,” says Zuck

While the speech didn’t really have anything new to offer – 130 million in India on Facebook, everyone deserves access to the social network, “Internet.org,” yada yada – his tone this time around was pointedly apologetic.

This is warranted. Earlier this year, those in India had an overwhelmingly negative response to his controversial attempt at providing certain sites for “free” to the country. The Indian government recorded more anti- “Internet.org” letters than it had ever received for any cause before. Zuckerberg countered this by allowing independent developers to work on the platform and ran a contest where applicable Indian startups could compete to win money.

Here’s a photo of Mark Zuckerberg running next to the India Gate in Delhi with the head of Internet.org, Chris Daniels, and other team members. Any guesses on who took it?

His trip also coincided with the announcement of “2G Tuesdays,” an initiative where Facebook employees would have to surf the social network and use its messenger on limited bandwidth. The belief is that this will help them envision a world where high speed internet is not easily accessible.

Critics (this author included) believe that the initiative is yet another example of Zuckerberg’s refusal to actually improve internet in India and that funneling money into the development of 2G apps only reinforces the idea that some are just fated to live with poor net access. While Facebook’s desire to expand its user base is understandable, it is really irritating when juxtaposed with the scheme’s very transparent altruistic marketing angle.

Others also seem to be tiring of Zuckerberg’s focus on his “free internet” scheme. Kunal Shah, CEO of Freecharge, posted a photo of the venue to Facebook earlier today with the caption “Right here to see what drives people to keep going.”

Kunal Shah captioned this photo “Right here to see what drives people to keep going :)”

While audience members tried to bring up other topics, Zuckerberg seemed focused on proving the benefits of his “free internet” scheme.

It wasn’t entirely black and white, however: “Safety check,” a tool that allows Facebook users to mark themselves safe after disasters was discussed (this was used extensively during the recent earthquake in Nepal) and an audience member piped up towards the tail end of the Q&A to ask about a similar feature that would help locate India’s many missing persons. Zuckerberg gave her a short answer explaining that it was something that the team was working on.