New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, and Serum Institute of India (SII) CEO Adar Poonawalla are among the TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2021. While Modi and Banerjee were included under the ‘Leaders’ category, Poonawalla was named under ‘Pioneers’.
This is what Indian-American journalist Fareed Zakaria wrote about PM Modi in TIME magazine: “Narendra Modi’s approval rating has slipped to a still sky-high 71%”.
“Mamata Banerjee, in her signature white sari paired with rubber flip-flops, has become the face of fierceness in Indian politics,” wrote journalist Barkha Dutt in her article about the Bengal chief minister in TIME. “Unlike many other women in Indian politics, Mamata has never been framed as someone’s wife, mother, daughter or partner. She rose from abject poverty—working once as a stenographer and a milk-booth vendor to support her family. Of Banerjee, it is said, she doesn’t lead her party, the Trinamool Congress—she is the party. The street-fighter spirit and self-made life in a patriarchal culture set her apart,” Dutt wrote.
“From the beginning of the pandemic, Adar Poonawalla sought to meet the moment. His company, the Serum Institute of India, was already the world’s largest vaccine maker when he promised 1.1 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines for the developing world by the end of 2021,” journalist Abhishyant Kidangoor wrote in TIME.
Poonawalla told Kidangoor in March that he didn’t want to “have regrets when history judges his actions.”
Another Indian on the list is Manjusha P. Kulkarni, an NRI, executive director of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, US. She, along with San Francisco State University professor Russell Jeung and veteran activist Cynthia Choi, were listed under the category ‘Icons’. Together, they run a platform, named Stop AAPI Hate, which has helped create a place where Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders could file firsthand accounts of racism they had experienced, News18 reported.
