Prime Minister Narendra Modi beat Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Donald Trump to emerge as the ‘World’s Most Powerful Person 2019’ in the reader’s poll conducted by UK-based British Herald magazine. PM Modi will be featured on the cover page of the July 15 edition of the magazine which earlier featured New Zealand’s PM Jacinda Ardern in the May-June issue and Putin in its March-April issue.

More than 25 world leaders were nominated in the reader’s poll and four candidates were finally selected for the final round by an expert panel.

The poll which closed on Saturday night declared PM Modi to be the winner with 30.9% of the votes ahead of Putin (29.9%), Xi (21.9%) and Trump at 18.1%. Interestingly, the website crashed during the voting due to overwhelming traffic as netizens rushed to the website to vote for their favourite leader. The website got as many as 3 million hits during the poll. The voting page on the magazine’s website received 2.5 million hits in the first week of June.