(December 29, 2025) At Global Indian, we don’t just track success, we track what people do with it. In 2025, we covered changemakers who built credibility in global ecosystems, then returned or redirected their lives to solve hard, local problems at scale in the realms of education inequality, farmer distress, accessible eye care, women’s livelihood, and the public-health crisis of polluted air.
What makes these stories stand out isn’t only achievement; it’s choice. Each of them could have stayed on safer, more lucrative tracks. Instead, they chose the messy work of building institutions, platforms, and solutions that hold up under real-world pressure. This year-end curation brings together our most powerful picks. They are the leaders who remind us that impact is not a speech, it’s a system.
Abraham George: Betting his life on education and dignity
A soldier who became an academic, entrepreneur, and philanthropist, Dr. Abraham George’s story is powered by urgency, and the feeling that life is only meaningful when it is used in service of others. Born in Trivandrum and trained at India’s National Defense Academy, his early years in the army shaped his definition of duty. A dynamite explosion that nearly killed him became his pivot point. “When I was blown up in a dynamite explosion, I asked myself – why did I survive?… That moment defined my purpose – to devote my life to helping the deprived,” he remarked in a chat with Global Indian.
He later reinvented himself in the United States, earning a doctorate from NYU Stern and building a high-powered career across banking and global finance. But the money was never the destination. At 49, he returned to India, determined not to wait for a symbolic milestone. “I didn’t want to wait until I was 50 to start making a difference,” he remarked.
Abraham George
I could have kept making money, but I knew I had to stop at some point and channel everything toward a larger purpose.
Abraham George
In 1995, he founded The George Foundation, building institutions like Shanti Bhavan Residential School, the Indian Institute of Journalism & New Media, healthcare initiatives, women’s economic empowerment through an agricultural model, and the landmark Project Lead Free campaign. “It’s not about how many people we can help today. It’s about empowering people so they, in turn, uplift their families and communities.” Read More
Ruchit Garg: Scaling farmer incomes across 13000 villages
Ruchit Garg’s changemaker arc begins with scarcity and curiosity. After losing his father at nine, he grew up in Lucknow in a home where “money was always short,” but books were abundant, thanks to his mother’s job at the Indian Railways Library. That library didn’t just educate him; it expanded his sense of what was possible. “Despite our financial struggles, at 12, I was reading the Harvard Business Review,” he recalled. This later became an interesting symmetry when he was invited to speak at Harvard on financial inclusion for smallholder farmers. “It was surreal.”
Ruchit Garg
Last year, we helped farmers sell 40,000 metric tonnes of food, and this year, we’re aiming for much more.
Ruchit Garg
His career travelled through innovation, Japan, and Microsoft in the US, where he worked on products like Xbox and Windows and absorbed a culture that encourages outsized ambition. But he wasn’t chasing the American Dream; he was chasing usefulness. Returning to India in 2019 after 11 years in the US, he carried the mission to make farming more profitable by connecting small farmers to markets, quality inputs, and better supply chains using technology and data.
His venture Harvesting Farmer Network‘s turning point came during the pandemic when mandis shut and farmers were forced to discard produce. Ruchit began with a just a Twitter page and six farmer posts, and watched it turn into a movement. Today, HFN operates in 13,000 villages, powered by 9,000 Saarthis, and has already impacted 30 lakh farmers. Read More
Dr Kasu Prasad Reddy: Making world class vision affordable
Two decades in the UK gave Dr Kasu Prasad Reddy a rare blend of global mastery and moral clarity. A renowned ophthalmologist, he built the UK’s first Excimer Laser centre, and played a pioneering role as an authorised Medical Examiner for the Civil Aviation Authority at Gatwick. And then he chose to return back to India. The reason of returning was empathy for his countrymen, and a sharp understanding of how health becomes social fate in India. “While in the UK, I realised that India needed the latest eye procedures, especially for the young girls who get rejected or are asked for more dowry for wearing glasses.” That realisation changed the course of his life. Returning in the late 1990s, he founded Maxivision in Hyderabad in 1996, not as a business expansion, but as a promise to make world-class procedures affordable and humane.
Dr Kasu Prasad Reddy
I invested everything, including my wife’s property, to build a centre committed to world-class eye care at a cost Indian families could afford.
Dr Kasu Prasad Reddy
What sets Dr Reddy apart is that his innovation is inseparable from ethics. In a time when healthcare can become transactional, he insists on tenderness: “Patients enter the hospital with fear. They deserve care, patience and kindness. We are not repairing machines. We are treating human beings.” And he draws a hard line on intent: “Healthcare is not a business. It’s about managing people with love, without expecting any awards or rewards.” His changemaking isn’t only in technologies introduced early, it’s also in the culture of care he built around them. Read More
Arvind Ravichandran: Powering women home chefs through Bhookle
Arvind Ravichandran spent 16 years in the United States living the big-tech life, building products at companies like Amazon and Microsoft, and carrying the mindset of an engineer who sees problems as solvable. Even as a student, he built assistive innovations like an intelligent cane for the visually impaired and a speech-to-text telephony solution for the hearing impaired, earning recognition and a patent. That early validation shaped his core belief: “The thinker and doer in me is a single person. I see a problem and I can fix it.”
Arvind Ravichandran
Yet his return to India wasn’t simply entrepreneurial timing. It was personal grief and a hunger for meaning. After his mother died in 2020, he found himself missing her food, and realising how flattened “Indian food” felt on most delivery platforms. The pain turned into a mission: to bring back authenticity, memory, and livelihood in one system. Bhookle was born, not as another aggregator, but as a platform connecting customers to women home chefs and regional, home-cooked flavours. He looks at entrepreneurship as the act of making an idea breathe.
I always knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. When you have solo ideas in your head, there is this excitement of seeing it alive in the real world and only entrepreneurs can do it.
Arvind Ravichandran
With 130+ chefs already onboard, Bhookle is building a people-first food economy where women earn sustainably, local cuisines stay alive, and technology quietly plays the enabler. His ambition is global, but the starting point is intimate: preserving what gets lost when we move away — taste, tradition, and the comfort of “Amma’s food.” Read More
Srikanth Sola: Taking on India’s pollution crisis
Dr Srikanth Sola’s changemaker journey begins with a doctor’s shock, and ends with a technologist’s solution. Trained at Stanford, with exposure to Harvard and the Cleveland Clinic, he could have stayed in the safe halo of American medicine. But after returning to India in 2008, he saw something alarming immediately. “In my first week, I was astounded by the number of patients I saw with heart disease.” Many were startlingly young — in their 20s and 30s, and the pattern pointed to a silent cause: air pollution.
Dr Srikanth Sola
For him, this wasn’t a clinical problem anymore. It was a systems failure. So he decided to build prevention at scale, launching Devic Earth and its AI-powered air purification technology, Pure Skies, which works across large spaces rather than just small indoor rooms, after years of R&D. “I started the process in 2008, and in 2018, Devic Earth and our technology, Pure Skies, was made available to the world.”
I can keep doing angioplasty the whole day, but this will not solve much. So, I decided to build something that will make air quality better in larger spaces.
Dr Srikanth Sola
What makes Sola compelling is that his innovation is anchored in philosophy. “If you want to reinvent the world, you have to start by reinventing yourself,” he says, a thought process that captures his shift from treating disease to preventing it. His vision is disarmingly universal: “Wherever people breathe, there is a need for clean air.” In a country where polluted air is an invisible predator, his work turns breath into a human right, engineered. Read More
What connects these five changemakers is not fame or funding. Itt’s follow-through. They didn’t simply identify problems; they built the scaffolding for solutions: schools, farmer networks, hospitals, platforms, and climate tech that can outlast any one person. This is why they are our year-end top picks. Their stories prove that the most powerful kind of success is the kind that returns home as responsibility and becomes impact you can measure, and lives that look different because someone refused to stay comfortable.
