Richest Indian Mukesh Ambani has featured in the top Global Thinkers 2019 ranking of the prestigious Foreign Policy publication alongside the likes of Alibaba founder Jack Ma, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and IMF head Christine Lagarde.
The publication on its website released a few of the names in the 2019 list of 100 Thinkers, saying the full list would be released on January 22.
"With a fortune of USD 44.3 billion, Mukesh Ambani displaced Jack Ma in 2018 as Asia's richest man. Ambani's fortune comes from his holdings in the oil, gas, and retail sectors, but he's likely to make his biggest impact on India through his new telecom venture Jio," it said.
Ambani is Chairman and Managing Director of Reliance Industries Ltd. Reliance Jio is a subsidiary of RIL.
"Offering cellular data and voice free for the first six months after Jio's launch, he got more than 100 million to sign up -- accelerating a smartphone internet revolution in the world's largest democracy," it said. "The next stage of Ambani's plan is to use the digital airwaves to sell content and lifestyle products, eventually competing with Google and Facebook."
Lagarde, it said, has "time and again proved the importance of the fund's role as a lender of last resort, even while trying to retool it as a champion of progressive policies on climate change and inequality."
Bezos is also on the list as Amazon, which started out as an online bookstore in 1994, "now touches just about every aspect of commerce, revolutionizing how people around the world browse and shop for all kinds of products."
Writer Amitav Ghosh is featured in the Energy & Climate Thinkers list for his 2016 book, The Great Derangement, being a "searing piece of nonfiction that questions why writers and artists consistently fail to use environmental disasters as centerpieces in their stories."