Times Magazine Person of the Year, Narendra Modi

At a time when he was facing herculean task of managing the cash flow in the post-demonetizaion and restoring normalcy on the boarders, besides to pacify agitating public from their concerns on gold ornaments, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a time to celebrate as he was declared as the winner of TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year – Reader’s Poll.

According to TIME Magazine, Modi won with 18 per cent of the vote when the poll closed Sunday at midnight. TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year will be announced on December 7, and is selected by TIME Magazine editors. Most significantly, he was placed well ahead of his closest contenders, including Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Julian Assange, who all received seven per cent of the “yes” vote.

Modi was also placed far ahead of other prominent figures of this year, like Mark Zuckerberg (two per cent) and Hillary Clinton (four per cent). It is for the second time that Modi has won the online readers’ poll for Time Person of the Year title, securing the honour in 2014, when he had got more than 16 per cent of the almost five million votes cast.

For the fourth year in a row, Modi is among the contenders for Time’s ‘Person of the Year’ honour, which the US publication bestows every year to the one “who has most influenced the news and our world in the past year, for good or ill”. Last year German Chancellor Angela Merkel was Time’s ‘Person of the Year’.

This year’s poll was conducted in partnership with Opentopic and IBM’s Watson, thereby assisting TIME editors to see how candidates were influential on the Internet.

Time said in recent months, Modi saw high approval ratings from Indians, according to a September Pew poll. It added that Modi has come under scrutiny recently for getting rid of 500- and 1,000-rupee notes, impacting cash-based businesses and threatening India’s economy.