The Fortune magazine has named three Indians – lawyer Indira Jaising, industrialist Mukesh Ambani and architect Balkrishna V Doshi – among the world’s greatest fifty leaders.

Read the full list here

The write-up with the “list of influential figures we admire most” begins by comparing Jaising with Apple CEP Tim Cook. “Though it seems unlikely, Tim Cook and Indira Jaising have something in common besides membership in Fortune’s 2018 ranking of the World’s Greatest Leaders. Cook (No. 14) is the wealthy CEO of Apple, the most valuable publicly traded company on earth; Jaising (No. 20) is an Indian lawyer who cofounded an NGO called Lawyers Collective, which promotes human rights issues. Yet they share this trait: Both have multiplied their organizations’ effectiveness by harnessing the power of unbundling. Following their example is a new imperative for the best leaders.”

Indira Jaising
Founder, Lawyers Collective

On Jaisingh, the magazine further says, “When the poorest in India need a voice, they find one in Jaising, a lawyer who has dedicated her life to battling injustice. Jaising 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.”

 

Mukesh Ambani (24th)
Chairman and managing director, Reliance Industries

This is what Fortune had to say about India’s most talked-about industrialist:

“In less than two years, India’s richest man has 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. The secret? Offering dirt-cheap data and free calls (and plowing billions of dollars into the infrastructure that transmits them). The effect, dubbed “Jio-fication,” has driven India’s higher-price carriers to drop costs (if not run them out of business), and it fueled a 1,100% rise in India’s monthly data consumption.”

 

Balkrishna Doshi (43rd)
Architect

On Doshi, the magazine writes:

“This year’s Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor, went to India’s Doshi, who has spent the bulk of his 70-year career championing accessible housing, earning the moniker ‘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. Underlying all his work is the ideal that all economic classes deserve good housing.”