Three Indian have made it to the Fortune 50 list of thinkers, speakers, and doers who are stepping up to meet today’s challenges. Chairman of Reliance Industries Mukesh Ambani, human rights lawyer Indira Jaising, and architect Balkrishna Doshi join Emmanuel Macron and Tim Cook in Fortune 50.
Founder of Lawyers Collective Indira Jaising was ranked 20th, while Ambani was at number 24. “When the poorest in India need a voice, they find one in Jaising, a lawyer who has dedicated her life to battling injustice,” Fortune said. “She has fought on behalf of victims of the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster, helped Syrian Christian women in India win property rights equal to their male counterparts’, and helped draft India’s first domestic violence law. “Her work has recently led her to Myanmar, where she was appointed by the UN to lead an investigation into the persecution of Rohingya Muslims,” it added.
Ambani, 61, bagged the 24th place as “in less than two years, (he) brought mobile data to the masses and completely upended the country’s telecom market. Since Ambani, chief of the $47 billion conglomerate Reliance Industries, launched Jio — the first mobile network in the world to be entirely IP-based — in September 2016, the company has signed up a staggering 168 million subscribers.”
Ranking Doshi at number 43, Fortune said he is the winner of architecture’s highest honour this year – the Pritzker Prize – and has spent the bulk of his 70-year career championing accessible housing, earning the nickname of “the architect for the poor”.
“His designs include the Aranya low-cost housing project in Indore, a labyrinth of homes and courtyards that provide around 80,000 residents with a balance of open spaces and communal living, and the mixed-income Life Insurance Corporation Housing in Ahmedabad, where several generations of a family can occupy levels of the same building.
“The Students” of Marjory Stoneman Douglas and other schools in the US that suffered from gun violence were collectively ranked at number 1, followed by Bill and Melinda Gates, and the MeToo movement. Others who made it to the list were Serena Williams, General Motors CEO Mary Barra, Tencent CEO Huateng ‘Pony’ Ma, Chinese environmentalist Ma Jun, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian and Hollywood actor-producer Reese Witherspoon.