The Late South African President Nelson Mandela is the most admired personality on a global scale but Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is close behind in 10th place according to a survey by World Economic Forum.
Mahatma Gandhi was in the fourth position trailing Pope Francis (2nd) and Tesla Motors CEO, Elon Musk (3rd). The respondents of the survey were spread across 285 cities in 125 countries.
The WEF’s Global Shapers Annual Survey 2015 also listed icons like Microsoft Founder Bill Gates (5), US President Barack Obama (6th), Virgin Group Founder Richard Barson (7), Apple Founder Steve Jobs (8), Nobel laureate Mohammad Yunus (9) and US investor Warren Buffett (11).
Out of the 1,084 respondents, three per cent voted for Modi as well as for Yunus while 20.1 per cent favoured Mandela. As many as 12.4 per cent of the respondents voted for Gandhi. All the survey respondents are members of the WEF’s Global Shapers Community aged between 20 and 30 years. In the list of 11, three personalities are not alive – Mandela, Gandhi and Jobs.
“Gandhi is known for his doctrine of nonviolent protests in order to achieve progress. The Indian lawyer, social activist, politician and writer became the leader of the nationalist movement against the British rule of India,” said the WEF report.
About Mandela, the report said that abolition of apartheid remains his greatest legacy, and under his leadership, South Africa emerged as a genuine democracy that saw many changes.
“Pope Francis is the first Latin American and non-European pope in more than 1,200 years. As the head of the Roman Catholic Church, he is the moral and spiritual leader of 1.2 billion people all over the world – from the Philippines, where 86 per cent of the population identify as Roman Catholic, to Brazil, which has over 125 million Catholics,” WEF said.
