Economist Narayana Kocherlakota is the highest ranked Indian-American in Foreign Policy journal's list of top 100 Global Thinkers. Kocherlakota, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, was placed 10th on the list that was led by Burma's Aung San Suu Kyi and Thein Sein.
Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old schoolgirl activist in Pakistan who survived being shot by a Taliban extremist after she spoke out in favor of equal educational rights for girls in Pakistan, was listed in 6th place.
Other Indian-Americans on the list include Ruchir Sharma (67), managing director, Morgan Stanley, New York; Raj Chetty (74), economist from Cambridge, Mass.; Ricken Patel (89), executive director, Avaaz, New York; and Vivek Wadhwa (90), entrepreneur from Menlo Park, Calif. Also on the list are author Salman Rushdie (33), who is based in New York; Nitish Kumar (77), chief minister of Bihar; India-based economist Raghuram Rajan (80); and Britain-based writer Pankaj Mishra (86).
According to the magazine, Kocherlakota said publicly in September that the Federal Reserve should hold interest rates near zero until unemployment falls below 5.5 percent. Described as “a lifelong inflation hawk,” he has been one of the most outspoken opponents of lowering rates and had voted against doing so in 2011, the magazine said.
Sharma, the journal said, made it to the list for dusting the gold off the "emerging markets." In his new book, “Breakout Nations.”
Sharma, who oversees a portfolio worth an estimated $25 billion, debunks conventional wisdom that the emerging markets of the last decade will continue to drive global growth in the next one, the magazine said.
Chetty, who made it to the list for “following the numbers wherever they lead,” earned tenure at Harvard at the age of 29. A winner of a MacArthur "genius" grant this year, he has been bucking the conventional economic wisdom since he was an undergraduate at Harvard.
According to the magazine, Chetty “is at the forefront of the growing field of behavioral public finance, using hard data to track how economic policy affects individual behavior and social welfare.”
Wadhwa, who was chosen for promoting a fresh idea in the U.S. immigration debate, is at the forefront of the movement to institute what he calls a "start-up visa," through which entrepreneurs with proven job creation and company size get fast-tracked for long-term visas.
According to a study he conducted, even as the number of immigrants in the United States has risen, the percentage of immigrant-founded companies has hardly budged from the 25 percent it was at in 2005; in Silicon Valley the numbers fell from 52 percent to 44 percent.
Patel, executive director of New York-based Avaaz, a civic organization he co-founded, was listed for taking “the fuzzy concept of a ‘global community’ and giving it teeth," the magazine said. Avaaz has grown since 2007 into “the world’s largest Web activism movement.”
A Canadian who spent his career working as an analyst in conflict zones such as Afghanistan and Sierra Leone, Patel “modeled Avaaz after the liberal advocacy group MoveOn.org on a global scale,” the magazine added.
Rushdie made it to the list for defending free speech, the magazine said. This year saw the release of Rushdie's memoir “Joseph Anton,” which describes his life in hiding after the 1989 fatwa condemning him to death for “The Satanic Verses,” a book that fundamentalists deemed offensive to the Prophet Muhammad.
Mishra was cited for “charting the intellectual rise of the East — without the West” in his 2012 book, “From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia.”
Kumar was selected for “turning around India's poorest state,” after winning the 2005 election. In his two terms in office, he has done just that, relying on an array of innovative programs to crack down on crime, shame corrupt public officials and boost economic development.
In addition to setting up a special fast-track court system to move trials along more quickly, Kumar's administration has offered cash rewards to whistleblowers and has broadcast bribery complaints on YouTube.
Former University of Chicago professor and IMF chief economist, Rajan is listed for saving India from its politicians, the magazine said.
His forecast about the financial crash due to irresponsible speculation proved right three years later and in August, he accepted the post of chief economic adviser to India’s Finance Ministry.
Canada-born Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU Center for Democracy in New York, was ranked 57th by Foreign Policy, which said he deserves praise for his emphasis that “assassination is not an American value.”
Jaffer, the magazine said, “played a central role in challenging the warrant-less wiretapping program and use of torture under George W. Bush,” and now is “forcing the CIA to justify its veil of secrecy: In
a landmark court case, he’s challenging its consistent refusal, over several years, to confirm or deny the drone program's existence.”
