NEW YORK, Sept 14:
Three Indians, including cricketer Harmanpreet Kaur, were named by TIME magazine as the top 100 emerging leaders shaping the world.
The ‘2023 TIME100 Next: the Emerging Leaders Shaping the World’ list, released on Wednesday, featured three Indians, Kaur, Nandita Venkatesan and Vinu Daniel. It also featured Indian-origin Nabarun Dasgupta.
Underlining that time at the top has not dulled Kaur’s competitive streak, the magazine said the Indian skipper’s “fire and flair have been instrumental in transforming women’s cricket from fringe curiosity to one of the world’s most valuable sporting assets..”
Kaur, 34, secured “legendary status back in 2017 when she scored a then-record 171 not out off just 115 balls in a World Cup match against Australia, leaving spectators agog at her extraordinary talent,” the release said. It said the cricketer is still making headlines, getting suspended for two matches and fined 75 per cent of her match fee in July for criticising umpires during India’s draw against Bangladesh.
In March, Kaur was announced as the captain of the Mumbai Indians (MI) team ahead of the inaugural edition of the Women’s Premier League (WPL).
Five franchises of the WPL sold for a combined USD 570 million in January, and in March, Kaur led the Mumbai Indians to become the league’s first champions. Venkatesan, 33, is a tuberculosis survivor who lost her hearing during her bout with a multidrug-resistant version of the disease, a side effect of the toxic cocktail of drugs she took during treatment.
She was named on the list, together with Phumeza Tisile, a South African health activist, who too lost her hearing to the disease, Together with Médecins Sans Frontières and Tisile, the longtime advocate filed a petition with the Indian government to deny pharma company Johnson & Johnson a secondary patent for a safer and more effective drug to treat TB after its initial patent expired.
This made way for cheaper generics to treat the disease.
In March, India rejected the secondary patent, a landmark victory that will help make the drug available at a much lower price and separately, Johnson & Johnson announced an agreement this summer that will make generic versions more accessible in lower-income countries, the release said.
“We had to undergo what we had to undergo,” Venkatesan said. “But maybe we could prevent this from happening to others,” she added. Daniel, who owns a studio, Wallmakers, was quoted as saying that “his best teachers were masons, workers, and locals in Kerala, India.”
“While a student there, he met his hero Laurie Baker-an architect celebrated for energy-efficient, evocative buildings-who shared Mahatma Gandhi’s advice: the ideal house should be made of materials found within a five-mile radius,” the release said.
His studio uses mud and waste as the chief components to make structures that are both utilitarian and alluring, according to its website.
“Vinu teaches us respect for local wisdom and material culture are key for a truly responsible attitude toward the environment and the future,” the release said. Indian-origin scientist Dasgupta helped launch a programme through a nonprofit that cleared bottlenecks stopping the opioid-overdose-reversing drug naloxone from getting to the front lines.
After creating new supply arrangements and buying the treatment in bulk, the organisation distributed over 1.6 million doses across the country in the past year, helping end a life-threatening drug shortage.
“Few Americans have done more to prevent drug-overdose deaths than Nabarun Dasgupta,” the release said. Dasgupta also devised a system of swabbing street drugs and testing them, collecting valuable information to help scientists and drug users alike. He aims to use science to answer big questions about drugs. “With 100,000 people dying a year, it’s not theoretical,” the scientist said. (PTI)
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