Social activist Anna Hazare, software czar Azim Premji and four other Indians have been named in the US-based Foreign Policy magazine's list of the top 100 global thinkers for 2011.
Economist Abhijit Banerjee, writer-activist Arundhati Roy, researcher Deepa Narayan and scholar Arvind Subramanian are the other Indians in the list topped by Arab activists who helped bring democracy to the Middle East. US President Barack Obama is ranked 11th on the list.
Nine Indians figured in the 2010 list. The highest spot to an Indian this year went to Premji, ranked at 14, who the magazine called the 'Bill Gates of India'.
'It's not just because of Azim Premji's enormous wealth that he is compared to the American technologist turned philanthropist,' the magazine said about India's third richest citizen with a net worth of $13 billion, according to Forbes magazine.
'It is Premji's unprecedented philanthropy, that recently has borne out the Gates comparison,' it said noting the chairman of the IT firm Wipro, recently contributed nearly $2 billion to a rural education project.
Anna Hazare, who is leading a popular campaign demanding tough new laws to curb corruption, is the next Indian who features on the list, ranked at number 37. He figures for 'asking the world's largest democracy to live up to its billing'.
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