Sunny Leone on BBC’s most influential women list

Actress Sunny Leone has made it to the BBC’s 100 most influential women list.

This is BBC’s fourth 100 women list. They are once again a mixture of high-profile and influential women including entrepreneurs, engineers, sportswomen, business women, fashion icons and artists.

Leone, who is celebrating her five-year anniversary in Bollywood, started in Indian showbiz by participating in the controversial reality TV show Bigg Boss in 2011.

She went on to star in Bollywood films such as Jism 2, Jackpot and Ek Paheli Leela.

Besides the actress, the list also includes four Indian names — Gouri Chindarkar (Sangli), Mallika Srinivasan (Chennai), Neha Singh (Mumbai) and Saalumarada Thimmakka (Karnataka), read a statement.

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 that 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.

The BBC’s 100 Women season kicked off on Monday.