Indians outperform in Forbes 30 under 30

Apart from their traditional domains of finance, science and technology, they are slowly making a mark in entertainment and the media as well

Every year, Forbes in the US publishes a series of lists called '30 Under 30' - 30 of "the brightest entrepreneurs, breakout talents and change agents" under the age of 30 in fields from technology to social entrepreneurship and sports. It is obviously highly prestigious to be featured in these lists, as previous names have included Mark Zuckerberg, Novak Djokovic and Malala Yousafzai.

What is interesting, however, is the large proportion of Indians on these lists every year. This year, for example, as many as 46 of the Forbes listees were of Indian origin (not including shared listees). Which means 7.7 per cent of the achievers were Indians even as they account for only 0.6 per cent of the total population of the US. When compared with other communities, Indian Americans have been clearly punching above their numbers. The Chinese, for example, with a population in the US that is nearly twice as large, have a significantly smaller representation on these lists.

When Forbes started this listing in 2011, the objective was to identify "today's disruptors and tomorrow's brightest stars", mainly from the US, but also globally. Today, its scope extends to 20 key fields: finance, venture capital, enterprise technology, consumer technology, manufacturing, retail & e-commerce, gaming, marketing & advertising, science, energy, healthcare, education, law & policy, media, social entrepreneurship, food & drink, art & style, music, Hollywood & entertainment and sports.

From the start, Indians-perhaps expectedly- have been strongly represented in fields such as finance, science and technology. But in recent years, they have also been showing up in other lists. Among them, interestingly, are Hollywood & entertainment and games.

Standing out
These young achievers are drawn from a wide spectrum of profiles. Some have made their reputations in mega organisations - like Nila Das, 27, vice-president at Citigroup; Tarun Gangwani, 27, offering manager at IBM Cloud; Ashish Kumbhat, 26, a monetary policy expert at the Federal Reserve Board; and Karishma Shah, 25, programme manager at Google(x), Google's elite taskforce created to explore new technologies that can solve the world's biggest problems.

Others have made their mark as entrepreneurs. Like Ruchit Nagar, 22, founder of KhushiBaby, maker of an innovatively designed necklace for toddlers that is actually a wearable digital device, recognised by UNICEF, for storing their immunisation records, and thereby capable of saving lives in developing countries. Or like Andrew Yakub, 28, founder of Rayton Solar, who is revolutionising solar energy technology by replacing the wasteful conventional process of slicing silicon wafers off a block. Instead, he has pioneered a way to use laser technology to deposit the silicon, micro-layer by micro-layer, and thus create wafers that are one-hundredth the thickness of conventional ones.

Then, there are research scientists, like Lujendra Ojha, 25, whose research into the geologic features of Mars led to NASA's dramatic announcement that water flows on that planet. Or Karan Jerath, 19 (one of the youngest achievers on the lists), who has invented a breakthrough sub-sea device to solve the problem of sea-floor oil-well disasters, like BP's infamous Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010.

So exactly how difficult is it to get listed in Forbes 30 under 30? This year, for example, Forbes received approximately 15,000 nominations. These were rigorously studied and shortlisted, category by category, by Forbes' teams of journalists. The short lists were then passed on to panels of judges specialising in each field (including, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, venture investor Chris Sacca, Wendy Kopp, founder CEO of the global Teach For All network, and eminent writer Ta-Nehisi Coates). Finally, just 600 were selected. That's how tough it is. And it gets tougher every year.

One of the most fascinating stories of this year's Indian-origin listees is perhaps that of Ahmad Wani and Nicole Hu, co-founders of OneConcern, an enterprise technology start-up whose mission is "to make the world a safer place, using cool tech".

Wani is from Kashmir, and Hu - despite her Chinese-sounding name and appearance - is from Visakhapatnam. After having worked in India (Wani at NTPC and Hu at Flipkart), they studied structural engineering and business, respectively, at Stanford and then set up OneConcern, a disaster solutions company that applies artificial intelligence to natural phenomena to revolutionise the way society plans for, and responds to, natural disasters.

The company's artificial intelligence-based technology can, for example, predict exactly which areas are likely to be worst affected by an earthquake, so that emergency response teams will know exactly where to go as rapidly as possible, thereby saving lives and property. OneConcern's technology is currently being tested by emergency services in parts of California which sit on top of the high-risk earthquake zone of the San Andreas Fault. Artificial intelligence-based disaster response strategies have also proved useful in developing country scenarios, where data is scarce - like in Nepal, for example, where, in trials after a major earthquake, they helped multiply the effectiveness of response teams on the ground.

While Indian and Indian-origin achievers have been steadily increasing their presence in the Forbes 30 under 30 lists, we will know that they have really arrived when they break out of their traditional left-brained domains of finance, technology and science, and start making their presence felt in the more right-brained spheres of art & style, music, sports and Hollywood. That'll be the day.

The writer is an advertising professional and social historian