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48 Most Influential Young Indians of 2020

March 28, 2021

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48 Most Influential Young Indians of 2020

1. Varun Khona

Varun khona a young man of 29 years of age is the Chief Executing Officer and co-founder of headout, an Indian-based travel booking site launched in 2014. Headout is an application that helps people to book and explore amazing activities around the world that are available for the last minute. When the site was launched almost 6 million peoples from about 200 countries utilized this platform. The new goal of Varun khona is to expand its service in 1000 cities by 2024

2. Krishnakant Mishra

Krishnakant Mishra the brand content lead of Ogilvy, 28 years of age was a medical aspirant turned engineer who has metamorphosed into a venturesome advertiser. He was the author of the novel ‘The Exclamator’. He was recently listed in the Forbes 30 Under 30 (India 2020) and at both Impact Magazine & Social Samosa ‘Top 30 advertisers in India. Beginning his career with activation, he has traveled the stretch of this country for over 1200 days in the last 5 years and touched a billion lives working on over 40 different brands across categories

3. Virat Kohli

Virat Kohli is a young Indian cricketer and is currently the captain of the national team of India. Due to his potential, he has been regarded as one of the finest batsmen in the world. Among Indian batsmen, Kohli has the best ever test rating (987 points), ODI rating (911 points), and T201 rating (897 points). He is consistently rated as one of the top-ranked batsmen in the world according to the ICC Player Ranking.

4. Akshay Kumar

Rajiv Hari Om Bhatia who was professionally known as Akshay Kumar is an Indian-born Canadian actor, producer, television personality, and martial artist who works in the Bollywood industry. He has appeared in over 100 films over 29 years and has won several awards for his acting skills including a national award and two Filmfare awards. Akshay is one of the most prolific actors of Hindi cinemas.

5. Kangana Ranaut

Kangana Ranaut is an Indian actress and filmmaker who works in the Bollywood industry. She has gained several awards, including three National Awards and four Filmfare awards, she has featured six times in Forbes India’s celebrity list. The Government of India honored her with the Padma Shri, the country’s fourth-highest civilian award in 2020.

6. Vikash Bakrewala

Vikash is a young man, 29 years of age who is an experienced management professional with demonstrated performance tracks across sales, distribution, and marketing (South India)of B9 Beverages. He became the youngest sales leader at the beer company, Bakrewala helped Bira and Boom expand to five geographical clusters in a year. He has a deep passion for building and scaling consumer goods and sales.

7. Ullas Samrat, Dhruv Khanna

Co-founders of Trition Foodworks, These young men who have launched a self-funded startup using hydroponics and low cost, internet enable smart farms that use 300 times less land clocked in Rs 1 crore turnover last fiscal. Their main goal is to deliver people with a safe, healthy, and efficient alternative to traditional methods of agriculture. Their plan is to achieve this by offering a system of growing food in an ecologically and economically viable manner, using a combination of hands-on experience and technology in a data-driven environment.

8. Sanket Jadia

Sanket Jadia who is a young artist of 28 years of age has progressed a practice that deals with history and historical images that records events of conflicts and violence, and how it shapes society’s perception of them. He was also an Inlaks Fine Arts Awardee, 2017, and has been recently featured in Forbes India.

9. Gaurav Choudhary

Gaurav Chaudhary, is an Indian-based YouTuber known professionally as Technical Guruji, in UAE. Gaurav is remarkable for producing YouTube videos regarding technology in Hindi. Gaurav Chaudhary and the Technical Guruji channel combined and have accrued over 25 million subscribers and 2.9 billion views on the platform at the beginning of January 2021. He has also been present in ForbesIndia’s 30 under 30 lists.

10.Akshay Chaturvedi

Akshay Chathurvedi is the Founder & CEO, Leverage Edu which is a platform engrossed in career counseling and university admission and has served about 10,000 students. He strongly believed in access to higher education must be democratized, so that a common person never loses out on exposure

11. Sai Pallavi

Sai Pallavi Senthamarai is a South Indian film actress and dancer who has acted in Telugu, Tamil, and Malayalam cinemas. She had received several awards including two Filmfare for her performances in the films Premam and Fidaa. She is an enthusiastic actress and wants to experiment with better roles and characters.

12.Navika Kumar

Navika Kumar who has become an eminent face of the Times Now channel, has made her mark across both print and broadcast journalism and has been in the field for almost three decades now. She is a post-graduate in Economics. Navika began her career with print media and further moved on to broadcast journalism. She has accomplished 15 years at Times Now and took the additional responsibility of Group Editor, Politics at the news channel.

13.Sonu Sood

Sonu Sood is a popular Indian actor, producer, and humanitarian who works predominantly in Hindi, Telugu, and Tamil films. In 2009, he received the Andhra Pradesh State Nandi Award for Best Villain and the Filmfare award for Best Supporting actor in his Telugu movie.

In July 2016, he launched the production house Shakti Sagar Production, named after his father, Shakti Sagar Sood. In September 2020, Sood was chosen for the prestigious SDG Special Humanitarian Action Award by the United Nations Development Program(UNDP) for his humanitarian works during the pandemic.

14.Amiya Adwitiya, Sisir Kopakka

They are the CEO and CTO of the company Squadcast. Squadcast is a Software as a Service company that ensures that the IT systems of its Customers are running seamlessly, by fixing everything from simple glitches to complete breakdowns.

15.Nikhil Kumar

He was the Co-Founder & Chief Evangelist at Setu. Nikhil Kumar collaborated with the iSPIRT Foundation before, where he was on building a vibrant developer ecosystem for Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN). Before the startup, Nikhil worked together with Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani on the “India Stack” of Aadhaar and UPI.

16.Priya Prakash

Priya Prakash is the Founder and CEO of HealthSetGo and also a healthcare entrepreneur. HealthSetGo is one of India’s largest healthcare organizations for schools with the idea to set up India’s largest network of health assisting schools. HealthSetGo currently works over 77 cities across India with more than 250,000 students and parents with its flagship program CARE which observes the healthy growth of students at School and generates intelligent awareness for Parents to empower them to take care of their child’s health as well as impart the right Health Education customized to the age of the child. She is a State Level Weightlifter, Tedx Speaker, health blogger, and Crossfit L1 Trainer.

17.Karan Johar

Rahul Kumar Johar professionally known as Karan Kumar Johar  often informally referred to as KJo, is an Indian film director, , screenwriter, producer, television personality, actor and costume designer who works in Bollywood films.

He is the Son of producer Yash Johar.In year 2020, he was conferred with the Padma Shri award, the fourth-highest civilian honor of India.

18.Ayushmann Khurrana

Ayushmann Khurrana born as Nishant Khurrana is an Indian actor, singer, and television host who works in Bollywood films. Known for his portrayals of ordinary men often battling social norms, he has gained a lot of awards including a National Film Award and four Filmfare Award, and has appeared in Forbes India celebrity list. Time magazine named him one of the100 most influential people in 2020.

19.Abhay Rangan

Abhay Rangan is the CEO of Goodmylk, who started as an animal rights activist at 16, founded Goodmylk with his mother to make plant milk affordable in India. While many players make vegan milk, Goodmylk is one of the few that has progressed into more product lines. It retails creamy curd made of peanuts, milk made of cashew-oat, vegan mayonnaise that is trans-fat and cholesterol free and butter based on vegetable oils.

20.Saurabh Chaudhary

Saurabh Chaudhary is a young Indian shooter aged 17. He attained a world record in 10m air pistol and a ticket to Tokyo as well. Saurabh gained 2 gold medals at the 2018 Asian games and was the youngest gold medalist at the Asian games. He broke his own world record with a score of 245.5 and claimed gold in Junior Men 10m Air Pistol at 2018 World Championship in Changwon, Korea.

21.Roshni Nadar

Roshni Nadar Malhotra who is a business woman as well as the chairperson of HCL Technologies and the first woman to lead a listed IT company in India. As claimed by IIFL Wealth Hurun India Rich List 2019 she is the richest woman in India. Roshni is the single child of Shiv Nadar the founder of HCL. She ranked 54th on the Forbes World’s 100 Most Powerful Women list in 2019.

22.Sunil Chhethri

He was born on 3 August 1984. Sunil Chhethri is an Indian professional footballer who plays as a winger or striker and captains both the Indian Super League side Bengaluru FC and the Indian National Football team. He served India with the 2007, 2009 and 2012 Nehru cup as well as the 2011 SAFF championship. He was one of India’s best players at the AFC Challenge cup in 2008 which India won the tournament and thus qualified for their first AFC Asian Cup in 27 years.

23.Ridhima Pandey

Ridhima Pandey, one of India’s young environmental activists who was just 11 years old, saw the devastating effect of climate change in India in the form of the Kedarnath flood. Sighting such an environmental disaster can change a person, Ridhima was the only young activist from India who accompanied Greta Thunberg in the protest. Pandey was on the list of the BBC’s 100 women announced on 23 November 2020. Pandey demanded for a complete ban on plastic. She has demand for the Indian government and local authorities to encourage the cleaning up process of the Ganga River.

24.P V Sindhu

Pusarla Venkata Sindhu, known as PV Sindhu, is an Indian professional badminton player and the first Indian woman to win an Olympic silver medal. Born on July 5, 1995, in Hyderabad, Sindhu is also one of the two Indian badminton players to ever win an Olympic medal, the other being Saina Nehwal. The proud mark of Sindhu’s career came in the year 2016 when she became the youngest and the first female athlete from India to win a silver medal at Rio Olympics. She has also graced with Padma Shri Award, India’s 4th highest civilian honor,

25.Akhil Aryan

Akhil Aryan is known to be a serial entrepreneur. He is the co-founder of ION energy with the vision of eco-friendly energy management, and to accelerate the transition to an all-electric future, the battery management and intelligence platform uses analytics to improve battery performance.

26.Bhuvan Bam

Bhuvan Bam is a 26 year old young YouTuber to hit 2 million subscribers. He was the first Indian YouTuber to hit such an amount of subscribers. He currently has 16 million subscribers and was recently invited to the World Economic Forum.

27.Palak Shah

Palak Shah is the CEO of Ekaya. She has focused on generating the versatility and global appeal of Indian heritage weaves. Palak Shah united her family’s 120-year-old business which is the production of textiles based in Benares. The same year, on a quest to redefine conventional ideas around Indian textiles, she launched luxury handloom brand Ekaya.

28.Sania Mirza

Sania Mirza is one of the finest women tennis players India has produced. In January it was the same Sania Mirza who had been a six-time grand slam champion, a former world no. 1 in doubles, and a three-time Olympian. She has got prestigious titles such as the Padma Bhushan and the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna, Sania Mirza’s achievements which have helped to cultivate a wide and ever-growing interest in tennis in India.

29.Yeduguri Sandinti Jaganmohan Reddy-

Yeduguri Sandinti Jaganmohan Reddy is an Indian politician. He has become the 17th and is the ongoing Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh. He is the organizer and president of YSRCP. He was the leader of opposition in the Andhra Pradesh Legislative Assembly from 19 June 2014 up to 29 May 2019.

30.Anushka Sharma

She is an Indian veteran film actress. Anushka Sharma started her career as a model and established herself as one of the prominent actresses and a cosmopolitan in nature. Apart from being achieved with many awards she is well known for her straightforwardness and outgoing personality.

31.Rohit Sharma

Rohit Gurunath Sharma otherwise Rohit Sharma is an Indian cricketer who represents the country in international cricket.  He is the ongoing vice-captain for the Indian cricket team and the current captain of Mumbai Indians in the Indian Premier League.  Rohit was ranked to be the only batsman in the world to hit three double centuries in ODI cricket. He also carries the record for most number of runs scored by a batsman in a single innings of ODI cricket

32.Akansha Deo Sharma

Akansha Deo Sharma’s association with the world’s largest furniture retailer Ikea, where she is the only Indian designer, started. The projects she has been associated with at Ikea in the last three years have helped in contributing to solutions ranging from skill development and empowerment of women to the use of sustainable materials for developing new products.

33.Ajeesh Achuthan

Ajeesh Achuthan is the co-founder and CTO of Open which is a neo-banking platform which has been introduced to meet the needs of startups and also for the financial operations of the MSMEs.

34.Ashwin Mittal

Ashwin Mittal leads the way to Course5 Intelligence. Ashwin has architected the growing progress of Course5 into the analytics, AI and insights powerhouse it is today. The foremost idea of Ashwin is to have Course5 drive the culture of decision-making based on analytics and market intelligence in today’s increasingly flat world.  Leaving the works behind, Ashwin is involved in various CSR activities related to children’s education and angel investing. 

35.Mahesh Kumar

Mahesh Kumar is the Founder & CEO of Tiger Analytics which is one of the fastest-growing Artificial Intelligence and advanced analytics consulting firms globally, Mahesh Kumar has maintained a significant focus on building a company known for solving complicated problems. Tiger Analytics today services over 35 Fortune 1000 clients across a wide range of industries.

36.Eshan Sadasivan

Eshan Sadasivan, a 29 year old man, who is pursuing his PhD in design program from the Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur (IIT-K), has made it to the ‘Forbes in the February edition. His company is the maker of the lightweight Deskit bag, which has a foldable study table attached for rural students which has been an aid for them.

37.Gaurish Singla

He is a 26 year old man who is the founder of Shivom. His aim is to make India disease-free in 5 years. Shivom provides genetic data to pharma companies while ensuring the individual remains anonymous and is incentivized.

38.Sreekanth Menon

VP Data Science at GENPACT brought over two decades of industry expertise to his role heading the AI/ML practice for Genpact. His foremost focus has been competency building in AI ecosystems, such as ML, NLP/Text Mining, and Computer Vision, and nurturing new capabilities. He has incubated and established over 50 advanced analytics solutions in the global market and worked closely with Fortune 500 clients by enabling them with innovative AI-led solutions and practices. 

39.Shub Bhowmick

Shub Bhowmick is the CEO and Co-founder of Tredence. He has built a career in unlocking value and driving customer impact. Under his able leadership, Tredence has maintained profitability and has created sustainable value for its more than 30 Fortune 500 clientele, as well as it has more than 600 employees. 

40.Ekta Kapoor

Ekta Kapoor is an Indian Film and TV Producer. She is a Film Producer, Television Producer, Managing Director, Businessperson and Creative Director of her production company, Balaji Telefilms. Ekta has recently initiated her fashion label “EK”. In 2012 she became the recipient of prestigious Asia’s Social Empowerment Award.

41.Deepak Punia

Deepak was an Indian wrestler aged 21. He became the first Indian to win the Junior World Championship. He also secured a place in the 2020 Olympics.

42.Krishna Gupta

Krishna Gupta was the founder of a 1441 pizzeria which employs Italian wood ovens and offers a Make your own pizza option. The revenue grew from Rs 2.88cr in 2017 to Rs 8.41cr in 2019.

43.Akshat Bhansal

Akshat Bhansal was the founder of Bloni. While using conventional handmade tailoring techniques, is also technologically forward in its utilization of fabric and styles. In the last two years, his collections have reevaluated the usage of the traditional chanderi fabric, and presented fabric made of marine plastic waste, among other things.

44.Rishab karwa, Nitin Rana

They are the co-founders of GoMechanic. GoMechanic serves as a tech platform where the platform connects the car owners to quick affordable and excellent servicing. They raised Rs 35cr in a Series A round in 2019.

45.Mary Kom

Mary Kom is one of the most fascinating athletes on the planet without any doubt. She had a feature film made about her life: Kom’s story .She was born in a poor region of India. She became the first Indian woman to win a gold medal at the Asian Games in 2014 and at the Commonwealth Games held in 2018.

46.Ms Dhoni

Mahindra Singh Dhoni is a well-known Indian cricketer who used to captain the Indian national team. He has shown remarkable performance and led India to the 2007 ICC World Twenty20 victory, the 2010 and 2016 Asia Cup victories, the 2011 ICC Cricket World Cup victory, and the 2013 ICC Champions Trophy victory. He is the current captain of Chennai Super Kings in the IPL.

47. Deepthi Sharma

Deepthi Sharma is an Indian professional cricketer who plays for the Indian National Women’s cricket team who is an all-rounder. She is a right-arm off-break bowler and left-handed batsman. Deepthi was the youngest player in the Indian National women’s team that played in the ICC Women’s World Cup 2017 in England.

48.Jubin Varghese, Ameya Gadiwan

Jubin Varghese and Ameya Gadiwan are the co-founders of Gegadyne Energy. They have developed a proprietary non-lithium battery that has the ability to charge a car battery from 0 to 100% within 15 minutes. It is a Mumbai-based company for Electric Vehicles and Energy storage.

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