In an attempt to connect with India's growing internet users, the Finance Minister P Chidambaram recently joined a google hangout session to take questions from young students, analysts and even farmers, about his budget. This news comes from the BBC
His hangout session lasted over an hour with over 38,200 views on YouTube on the day. It was also broadcast live by most mainstream news channels in India. American Vice President Joe Biden has also engaged in a google hangout recently.
" At the end of 2012, it was estimated that India had more than 150 million internet users, which is the same number of television sets in the country. Of this, 65 million are Facebook users and Twitter has an estimated 35 million accounts."
Although a small percentage of people in india are on the internet they still rank in the top 3 internet markets in the world.
Indian politicians have been making a push to be more active on social media with the latest election coming up, which is a strategy American politicians have be using lately. Although the accounts may not actually be run by the politicians themselves they provide information about campaigns.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is often been criticised for being inaccessible to the media. He started a Twitter account last year to inform people about the work done by his office.
But some would say the push to be active online is because of the number of incidents with social media the Indian government has had in the past year
In November, two women were arrested over a comment on Facebook.
In 2011, the government announced that it would introduce guidelines to ensure "blasphemous material" did not appear on the internet.
The government is looking at setting up a social media wing in charge of publicizing the initiatives of all ministries and government departments.
This shows the Indian government is becoming more open to social media and the internet in general. This is a strategy we have seen in America. Both presidential and vice presidential candidates had active twitter accounts during the last election. I think social media and politics mixing is good because I think it allows more people to have their voice heard. We live in a time now were, because of social media and the internet, anybody can share their voice on the internet.