Former US president Bill Clinton has urged Indian-Americans to play a greater role in ensuring that social development in India kept pace with the technological advances in the country.
Speaking on Monday at an American India Foundation charity fund-raiser in San Francisco, Clinton said India's future was threatened mostly by its continuing problems with Pakistan and now the growth of religious violence.
Underlining that the future of India would play an instrumental role in the future of the world, he urged Silicon Valley's increasingly influential Indian-Americans, whom he characterised as the nation's most prosperous and well-educated ethnic group, on to a new era of philanthropy.
Indo-Americans would get a 'higher rate of return' in their homeland by leveraging their money through such groups as the American India Foundation, he said.
"One of the things that we know is that people have less cause to fight - whether there are religious or other differences - when they have practical things they do together, when they live in an interdependent environment," Clinton said, as quoted by the San Jose Mercury News.
Organisers said about 120 people attended the fund-raiser, including Oakland mayor Jerry Brown and entrepreneur Kanwal Rekhi.
Growing violence in India in which Islamic and Hindu fundamentalists have been implicated, have triggered a debate in Silicon Valley, the newspaper said.
Cisco and Oracle, for example, decided to drop funding for a Maryland-based charity, India Development and Relief Fund, after a report co-written by valley residents alleged it supported Hindu nationalist activities.
