The Greatest Indian

The Greatest Indian was a poll sponsored by Reliance Mobile and conducted by Outlook magazine, in partnership with CNN-IBN and The History Channel.

[2] A list of 100 names was presented to and compiled by a 28-member jury composed of actors, writers, sportspersons, entrepreneurs, and men and women of distinction in their fields.

[3] This jury included N. Ram (former Editor-In-Chief of The Hindu), Vinod Mehta (Editor-in-Chief of Outlook), Soli Sorabjee (Former Attorney General of India), Sharmila Tagore (Bollywood actress and former Chairperson of the Censor Board of India), Harsha Bhogle (sports), Chetan Bhagat (author),[4] Ramachandra Guha (historian),[3] Shashi Tharoor (politician and author), Nandan Nilekani, Rajkumar Hirani, Shabana Azmi and Arun Jaitley.

A three-way process was then used to assess a top ten, in which equal weight was given to the votes of the jury, an online poll, and a market survey conducted by the Nielsen Company.

The oldest living nominees at the time of the poll were B. K. S. Iyengar (93) Ravi Shankar (92), Verghese Kurien (90), R. K. Laxman (90), Dilip Kumar (89), Atal Bihari Vajpayee (87) and M. S. Swaminathan (87), while Sachin Tendulkar (39) was the youngest.