IT Minister Dayanidhi Maran Tuesday returned from a five-day visit to San Francisco where he projected India as a strategic hub for manufacturing, marketing, research and development.

Maran emphasised the need to work closely with the US to develop the Indian IT hardware sector to create hi-tech manufacturing jobs and consolidate its position in the software and outsourcing markets, an official release said here.

The IT minister met several captains of the tech industry, including Craig Barrett of Intel, Hong Liang Lu of UT Starcom, Mike McNamara of Flextronics, John Chambers of Cisco, Hector Ruiz of AMD, Kenneth L. Schroeder of KLA-Tencor and Craig London of Solectron.

The minister also had one-on-one meetings with the heads of Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, Sequoia Ventures, Venrock, MayField, Benchmark, USVP, Charter Ventures, Clearstone Partners, Matrix Partners, Accel Partners, NEA, Menlo Ventures and Vanguard, among others.

In the meetings, Maran presented India's strength in the telecom and IT sectors with a view to getting high quality venture capital investments into the country.

Maran also met officials from the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

ICANN chairman Vincent G. Cerf and president Paul Twomey apprised him of the latest developments in the field.

Maran visited the headquarters of Google to see the work of translation of existing content to various languages. He invited the Google team to visit India