HISTORY TV18 & CNN IBN's search for the greatest Indian gathers pace!

Inching closer in its quest to find “The Greatest Indian” after Mahatma Gandhi, HISTORY TV18 and CNN IBN today announced the names of the top10 nominees for the channels’ biggest local initiative. The “The Greatest Indian” will now be selected from these Greats.

 

The top 10 shortlisted contenders include super achievers from diverse fields ranging from politics to music and from sports to social service. The list boasts of an interesting mix of eminent Indians like Jawaharlal Nehru, Lata Mangeshkar, Sachin Tendulkar and Mother Teresa.

 

Since the revelation of the Top 50 nominations on June 4th, the first phase of nation-wide voting received a staggering 71,29,050 unduplicated votes. The voting also created phenomenal buzz in popular social media networks – Twitter and Facebook with three hashtags related to the property trending on Twitter- an average of one every week. The number of followers on Twitter has increased 3 fold to 2500 during the campaign period. The Greatest Indian has reached over 6 million Facebook users and over 2 million new users have been reached via viral content. Additionally, over 3 lakh users were engaged and the microsite received over 2 lakh likes, comments and shares.

 

The initiative is based on the path-breaking series featured on BBC called ‘The Greatest Briton’, and is set to trigger a national debate on who is the Greatest Indian after Mahatma Gandhi. Launched in 2002 in the UK, the initiative reached out to millions of viewers and broke significant viewership records there. An astounding 21 countries have successfully adopted this format since then, and it now promises to create history here in India too.

 

The entire process, one of the most thorough and meticulous in the industry, is being audited by Grant Thornton. Along with the nationwide poll, equal weightage will be given to the jury’s selection as well as a separate market research poll conducted by The Nielsen Company.  This process will be followed in both phases of the initiative, the first being to arrive at a shortlist of the top 10 ‘Greats’ and the second, the selection of the ‘Greatest Indian’. The initiative will culminate with the announcement of the Greatest Indian in a glittering ceremony to be telecast around Independence Day this year.

 

As part of the nationwide poll, viewers can cast their vote by visiting the website TheGreatestIndian.in or giving a missed call to a unique number assigned to their nominee of choice.