Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been ranked among the top 10 most powerful people in the world by Forbes, in a list that has been topped by Russian President Vladimir Putin for a fourth straight year and has US President-elect Donald Trump in the second place. Modi ranks ninth in the list of 74 of the World’s Most Powerful People. Forbes said, India’s populist prime minister remains hugely popular in his country of 1.3 billion people. Modi has also emerged as a key figure in the international effort to tackle climate change, as planetary warming will deeply affect millions of his country’s rural and most vulnerable citizens. It also took note of the unexpected decision made by Modi to demonetise India’s two high-value currency notes in a bid to reduce money laundering and corruption, creating a nationwide frenzy to quickly swap out the bills. US President Obama comes in on the 48th spot. Forbes’ annual ranking of the World’s Most Powerful People identifies one person out of every 100 million whose actions mean the most. On the second spot is 70-year-old Trump who will become the first billionaire president of the United States. The list includes Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani on the 38th spot. Forbes said the 59-year-old oil and gas tycoon sparked a price war in India’s hyper competitive telecom market with the launch of 4G phone service Jio at the annual shareholder meeting of his Reliance Industries in September. The list also includes Microsoft’s India-born CEO Satya Nadella on the 51st spot. The third most powerful person in the world also happens to be the most powerful woman: Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany and the backbone of the European Union. The list includes Xi (4), Pope Francis (5), Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates (7), Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (10), French President Francois Hollande (23), Apple CEO Tim Cook (32), North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (43) and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (57), among the others.
Exactly a month after his last show on Times Now, senior journalist Arnab Goswami has announced that his new venture would be called Republic. Goswami resigned from Times Now on November 1. Rahul Shivshankar has since taken over as Editor In Chief of the news channel. Reports suggest the new channel will start airing before the crucial Uttar Pradesh elections in the first quarter of 2017. Goswami shot to fame for his daily prime time debate show The News Hour that reportedly brought in over 60% revenue for the news channel and has a dedicated audience base across the country. He also conducted detailed interviews with politicians, sportspersons and celebrities on Frankly Speaking. Because of Goswami’s primetime appearance, Times Now was able to sideline a lot of the older players in the English news space. This success led to Arnab Goswami being promoted as President, News, of Times Now and ET Now. He resigned after working at the top position for ten years at Times Now. Goswami has started his career at The Telegraph in Kolkata.
External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj has been included in Foreign Policy magazine’s 2016 list of 15 Global Thinkers ‘for fashioning a novel brand of Twitter diplomacy’. In a website posting, the magazine recalled how, when around 10,000 Indian workers in Saudi Arabia faced a ‘food crisis’ earlier this year due to job losses, Sushma Swaraj tweeted about the issue to her six million followers there. What followed was a week-long social media operation in which Swaraj posted information for migrants about rations provided by the Indian embassy, claims for unpaid wages, and government-organised transportation home. Stating that this was not the first time that Sushma Swaraj used the internet to reach out to people abroad, the posting said, “From evacuating Indians from Yemen to helping replace lost passports, Swaraj has earned the nickname ‘the common tweeple’s leader’ for her aggressive use of Twitter.”
V K Sharma has been appointed as the chairman of state-owned behemoth Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) for the next five years. The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) has approved the proposal of the Department of Financial Services for the appointment of V K Sharma, MD, LIC, as chairman. Sharma has been serving as LIC’s managing director (MD) since 2013. Having joined the body as a direct recruit officer in 1981, Sharma has served as the chief executive of its mortgage subsidiary LIC Housing Finance Ltd and zonal manager in charge of the south zone. As Managing Director at LIC, Sharma was already acting as chairman since September 16 when the then chairman S K Roy was relieved of his duties. Roy had resigned in June, nearly two years ahead of his retirement. Roy, appointed by the previous UPA government, was serving as the chairman since June 2013. LIC is the largest financial institution in the country with over Rs.22.10 trillion in assets, which is over 15 per cent of India’s gross domestic product (GDP) of Rs.134 trillion. With around Rs.40,000 crore profit last fiscal, LIC is the most profitable entity in the country, next only to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) which transferred Rs.66,000 crores of its surplus profit to the government in the past fiscal.
Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Development of North-Eastern Region (DoNER) Jitendra Singh recently held a meeting with top industry leaders to discuss ways and means of promoting tourism and trade in the Northeast. It was attended by Indian Merchants’ Chamber (IMC) President Deepak Premanarayan, former IMC president Pradeep Chenoy, Maharashtra Tourism Minister Jaykumar Rawal and leading Mumbai industrialists. The decision to set up a Northeast desk in Mumbai to promote tourist and trade investment from Maharashtra and other western parts of country in the Northeast was taken. Singh proposed medical tourism for a well equipped place like Mumbai to attract healthcare seekers and patients from the Northeast, who presently travel to distant places like Vellore in Tamil Nadu. He asked corporate hospitals to set up referral clinics in the Northeast.
Bollywood actor Priyanka Chopra was picked up by the Assam government as the state’s tourism brand ambassador for two years, according to state finance and tourism minister Himanta Biswa Sarma. Chopra will attend a tour operators meet, she will also engage in shoots for TV commercials and still photos for the tourism campaign for Assam. “Priyanka Chopra is beyond doubt one of the top-most popular faces in India as well as abroad. She will be in contract with us as brand ambassador for two years, during which she will promote Assam tourism. She will also visit Assam several times in the next few months to take part in shoots for TV commercials and still photographs in different locations of the state,” minister Sarma said. Sarma also said that Assam would go global in its campaign to attract tourists to the state. “We are this time not restricting our tourism campaign only within the country. Instead, we are going for a massive global campaign, particularly targeting tourists in the US, England, Japan and other such countries that have some connect with Assam,” said the minister.
Chairperson and Editorial Director of Hindustan Times, Shobhana Bhartia has been conferred France’s top civilian honour, ‘Officier de la Legion d’Honneur’. Ambassador of France to India Alexandre Ziegler gave away the award at an event at the French embassy recently. Bhartia, a former Rajya Sabha member, said the award is a matter of privilege for her and an opportunity to add to the ‘strong ties’ shared by India and France. A self-confessed ‘Francophile’ and an admirer of the country’s “sense of aesthetics”, Bhartia said that one of the first interviews she gave was to French newspaper ‘Le Figaro’, which, she said, inspired her towards experimenting in the Sunday newspaper segment. Bhartia also hailed the resilience shown by the French people in the face of repeated acts of terrorism.
President-elect Donald Trump has appointed PepsiCo Chairman Indra Nooyi on the President’s Strategic and Policy Forum that will consult with him on implementing his economic agenda. The forum is headed by Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO of the investment company Blackstone and includes Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, and CEOs Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla, Uber’s Travis Kalanick, Jamie Dimon of Chase and Mary Barra of General Motors. Trump’s transition team said that forum members will give Trump their views on government policy, job-creation and productivity in a frank, non-bureaucratic and non-partisan manner. America has the most innovative and vibrant companies in the world, and the pioneering CEOs joining this Forum are at the top of their fields, Trump was quoted to have said. He went on to add, “My administration is going to work together with the private sector to improve the business climate and make it attractive for firms to create new jobs across the United States from Silicon Valley to the heartland.” Nooyi heads a multinational with an annual revenue of $63 billion that employs 1,10,000 people. A graduate of Madras Christian College in Chennai, she has management degrees from the Indian Institute of Management in Kolkata and Yale University. Earlier Trump had appointed Shalabh Kumar, the chair of the Republican Hindu Coalition, to the transition finance and inauguration teams. The finance team members review prospects for administration positions and make recommendations to Trump.
The National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) has embarked on a mission to reduce India’s carbon footprint by phasing out all inefficient thermal power plants older than 25 years, with modern energy efficient super critical ones. The plants would be replaced in about five years, with an investment of around Rs.50,000 crore, said Union Minister of State (IC) for Power, Coal, New & Renewable Energy and Mines, Piyush Goyal at the 26th National Energy Conservation Day 2016 function organised by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) recently. The minister also urged state governments to work in mission-mode to modernise their 25 year old thermal power plants with new super critical technology. He said his ministry would be providing a 300 KW solar panel, 8-hour battery backup, 5 LED bulbs, an energy efficient ceiling fan and a solar power based mobile phone charging socket free of cost to each of the over 16,000 households in about 800 inaccessible villages lacking grid connectivity under the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti Yojana (DDUGJY).
CP Gurnani, the 57-yearold boss of Tech Mahindra said that Indian technology outsourcing companies have always transformed themselves in the past and that it will be wrong to write off the country’s $150-billion outsourcing industry even as new technologies disrupt the landscape. In an interview in Pune last week, Gurnani shared the bets Tech Mahindra is making and why he remains confident that the company will be able to remain relevant even as technology fundamentally changes the way companies across industries do business. “It will be wrong to write us off. I see the present as exciting times. Remember, Indian IT has seen changes all throughout its life. It all started with Father Kohli (F.C. Kohli, the first CEO of Tata Consultancy Services Ltd). The model then was that companies said, ‘we have consultants and we will give them to you’. Then the Y2K moment happened, which was like an inflection point. ‘In all these decades, the industry has grown,’ he said.
Sonam Gupta, the name synonymous with betrayal that ruled social media through the year, especially post-demonetisation, made a surprise entry at No 3 in the Google India list of top 10 trending personalities. The fictitious name first appeared on a torn Rs.10 note in August this year and was back on a new Rs.2,000 note after demonetisation and went viral on various social media platforms with the tagline ‘Sonam Gupta bewafa hai (Sonam Gupta is unfaithful)’. The list of top trending personalities was led by US president-elect Donald Trump, followed by Olympic medallist P V Sindhu at second spot. Gymnast Dipa Karmakar took the fourth spot, followed by actor Disha Patani who recently made her Bollywood debut in a biopic on Indian cricketing star M S Dhoni, at fifth place. Indian female wrestler and Olympic champion Sakshi Malik also featured among the top 10 trending personalities on Google. Rio Olympic Games 2016 emerged as the top trending search query among Google users, followed by the augmented-reality (AR) game Pokemon Go. Among top trending news events, Rio Olympics 2016 again topped the charts, followed by the US elections and Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union (Brexit) at the second and third spot, respectively.
by Joe Williams
