Fortune Magazine released their fourth annual ranking of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders 2017 on March 23, 2017.
- Every year Fortune magazine puts out an annual list on world leaders who are transforming the world and inspiring others to do the same in areas of business, government, philanthropy and the arts.
- State Bank of India’s Chairman Arundhati Bhattacharya has been ranked 26 among 50 leaders while Indian-origin physician Raj Panjabi, founder and CEO of Last Mile Health, have been placed at 28th position.
- The list has been topped by Theo Epstein, the President of Baseball Operations at Chicago Cubs.
Top 5 Rankers
| Rank | Winner | Designation |
| 1 | Theo Epstein | President of Baseball Operations at Chicago Cubs |
| 2 | Jack Ma | Alibaba Group Executive Chairman |
| 3 | Pope Francis | First Latin American pope |
| 4 | Melinda Gates | Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Co-chair |
| 5 | Jeff Bezos | Amazon Founder and CEO |
About the 2017 World’s 50 Greatest Leaders List
Melinda Gates is the top ranked woman to make the list at fourth spot. Her husband, Bill Gates, is nowhere on the list.
- Similarly, US President Donald Trump is also nowhere on the list.
- Among others, Ava DuVernay, Film Director and Screenwriter (6), H.R. McMaster, US National Security Advisor (7), Tsai Ing-Wen, President Taiwan (8), John McCain, US Senator, Arizona (9) and Angela Merkel, German Chancellor (10) completes the top 10 list.
- Some of the other great leaders in the list includes Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen (17), former US Vice President Joe Biden (23), Shakira (27), Elon Musk (30) of Tesla and SpaceX, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (31), Chance the Rapper (46), and London Mayor Sadiq Khan (48).
About Arundhati Bhattacharya
Early Life
Arundhati Bhattacharya, an Indian banker was born in a Bengali family in the city of Kolkata and spent her childhood in Bhilai since her father Prodyut Kumar Mukherjee worked at Bhilai Steel Plant.
- Her mother Kalyani Mukherjee was a homeopathy consultant in Bokaro.
- Arundhati completed her schooling from St. Xavier’s School, Bokaro and studied English Literature at Calcutta’s Lady Brabourne College and then at Jadavpur University.
Career
Bhattacharya joined SBI, the largest lender on India, in September 1977 as probationary officer when she was 22 years old.
- She has held several positions during her 36-year career with the bank including working in foreign exchange, treasury, retail operations, human resources and investment banking.
- On September 30, 2013, she became the 24th chairman of the largest centrally-owned Indian bank, SBI, and the first woman to lead the bank. She succeeded Pratip Chaudhuri as Chairperson.
- Bhattacharya expertly guided SBI through ongoing battle with bad loans and surprise demonetization scheme.
State Bank of India
State Bank of India (SBI) is an Indian multinational, public sector banking and financial services company. It is a government-owned corporation with its headquarters in Mumbai, Maharashtra. The company is ranked 232nd on the Fortune Global 500 list of the world’s biggest corporations as of 2016.
- Founded: 2 June 1956
- Headquarter: Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
About Raj Panjabi
Raj Panjabi was born on February 3, 1981 in Monrovia, Liberia. His father was an Indian who had migrated to West Africa.
- Panjabi is a physician and social entrepreneur and co-founder and CEO of Last Mile Health.
- He also serves on the faculty of the Division of Global Health Equity at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
- Panjabi’s nonprofit Last Mile Health is taking steps to change problems affecting poor regions by training locals in developing countries in life saving measures, such as protecting themselves against pandemics and safely burying victims killed by infectious diseases.
- Last Mile in Liberia helped to control the spread of Ebola during the 2014 outbreak.
