Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been listed among the 72 most powerful people on the planet By Forbes! Seeing an Indian Head of State featured on Forbes’ annual list is surely a proud moment for every Indian- irrespective of his party affiliations and loyalties.
PM Narendra Modi ranked 15th most powerful person and 7th most powerful politician in the world.
On PM Modi, Forbes said, “India’s newest rock star doesn’t hail from Bollywood. He is the newly elected Prime Minister who sailed into office in May with a landslide victory, ushering the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) into power after decades of control by the Gandhi dynasty.”
The Forbes Editors create a list of the most powerful people in the world every one year, choosing one person for every 100 million people walking the Earth. With the world population estimated at 72 billion at the moment, 72 people from across the globe have been named in this list for 2014.
Interestingly, the most powerful person on the planet is not Barack Obama as you might think – it is his arch-rival Vladimir Putin who tops the list.
Nominees to this list are selected by measuring their power along four parameters which include, besides the financial assets controlled by a candidate, the number of people he/ she is in a position to influence, his/ her power in multiple spheres and how actively they have used their power during the last 12 months.
Though the ‘virtual’ Prime Minister of India during the previous Congress led government, Mrs. Sonia Gandhi was placed at No. 21 in the list for 2013, Mr. Manmohan Singh’s name was missing.
With the present occupant firmly straddled in his seat, he has made it to the list, ousting “Madam Ji” from the list.
There are 11 people besides the Indian PM who are being featured on this list for the first time. they include Alibaba owner Jack Ma, Egyptian President Abdel el-Sisi, terror group ISIS chief Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, General Motors CEO Mary Barra and others.
The youngest person on this list is the 30 year old Facebook founder, owner and CEO Mark Zuckerberg who is at # 22. Second to him are Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin- both 41 year olds. They are placed at numbers 9 and 10 in the list.
Females are not represented well on this list, with only 9 of the 72 most powerful people in the world being women. The silver lining here is that there are two women among the top ten- the German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the US Federal Reserve Chief, Janet Yellen. They are placed at numbers 5 and 6 respectively. The list had only three females in it when it was first published in 2009- improvement indeed!
Other Indians apart from the PM who were mentioned on this list include Mukesh Ambani (at number 36), Lakshmi Mittal (at number 57) and Satya Nadella (at number 64).
Other heads of state in this list include the French President Francois Hollande (17), Iranian Grand Ayatollah Ali Hoseini-Khamenei (19), Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu (26), North Lorean leader Kim Jong-un (49) and Japanese leader Shinzo Abe (63) and others.
See the complete list here.