Bollywood actor Sunny Leone has made it to the BBC’s 100 most influential women list.
The BBC on Monday published its list of inspirational and influential women for 2016. They are once again a mixture of high-profile and influential women, including entrepreneurs, engineers, sportswomen, business women, fashion icons and artists.
Sunny, who is celebrating her fifth anniversary in Bollywood, started in Indian showbiz by being a part of controversial reality TV show Bigg Boss in 2011. She went on to star in Bollywood films like Jism 2, Jackpot and Ek Paheli Leela.
Apart from Sunny, the list also includes four Indian women namely Gouri Chindarkar (Sangli), Mallika Srinivasan (Chennai), Neha Singh (Mumbai) and Saalumarada Thimmakka (Karnataka).
Chindarkar is a 20-year-old computer engineering student from Sangli, Maharashtra. She is one of the first children in India to experience a unique learning experience now known as School in the Cloud.Srinivasan, 57, is the CEO of Tractors and Farm Equipment Ltd. She is known as the Tractor Queen of India and has grown her family company into the third largest tractor manufacturer in the world.
Singh is a 34-year-old actor-writer who founded a movement to encourage women to walk the streets in Mumbai to defy harassment.
Thimmakka is a 105-year-old environmentalist from Karnataka who has planted more than 8,000 trees in 80 years, a project which first started in response to social ridicule at not being able to have children. She is the oldest woman on the BBC 100 women list.
Some of this year’s high-profile women include singer-songwriter Alicia Keys; US gold medal winning gymnast Simone Biles and French politician Rachida Dati.