INVENTORS from India

Top 2

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Indian Inventors of all time. This list of famous Indian Inventors is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

1. Arunachalam Muruganantham (b. 1961)

With an HPI of 45.46, Arunachalam Muruganantham is the most famous Indian Inventor.  His biography has been translated into 22 different languages on wikipedia.

Arunachalam Muruganantham (born 12 October 1961) also known as Padman is a social entrepreneur from Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, India. He is the inventor of a low-cost sanitary pad-making machine and is credited for innovating grassroots mechanisms for generating awareness about traditional unhygienic practices around menstruation in rural India. His mini-machines, which can manufacture sanitary pads for less than a third of the cost of commercial pads, have been installed in 23 of the 29 states of India in rural areas. He is currently planning to expand the production of these machines to 106 nations. The movie Period. End of Sentence. won the Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject) for the year 2018. The 2018 Hindi film Pad Man was made on his invention, where he was portrayed by Akshay Kumar. In 2014, he was included in Time magazine's list of 100 Most Influential People in the World. In 2016, he was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India.

2. John Shepherd-Barron (1925 - 2010)

With an HPI of 44.94, John Shepherd-Barron is the 2nd most famous Indian Inventor.  His biography has been translated into 27 different languages.

John Adrian Shepherd-Barron OBE (23 June 1925 – 15 May 2010) was an India-born British inventor, who led the team that installed the first cash machine, sometimes referred to as the automated teller machine or ATM.