Beijing: A woman business manager from India has been nominated among eight foreign residents in a public online vote to carry the Olympic torch on Chinese soil in August next year.
Meena Barot, an employee of a private firm, living in Shijiazhuang, Hebei, since March 2005, is the privileged Indian expatriate who would carry the flame for 200 meters as would each of the other seven foreigners. Thirty-five-year-old Meena occupied the fourth place in order of winning votes after a month-long campaign with 262 people from across 47 nations and regions vying for the eight available slots and 245,000 voting.
"I saw an opportunity not only to represent India, but also to thank the people of China for their kindness," said Meena, who asked two English dailies in India for a helping hand to mobilise her countrymen to vote for her. She secured 9,266 votes.
Meena with a Mandarin proficiency of 2.5 to 3.0 on the scale enjoys reading books, watching movies and playing badminton, the official China Daily said in a profile.
The eight expats who will carry the torch in order of winning votes are: Jenny Bowen of the US, Marcos Torres of the Philippines, Werner Ebel of Germany, Meena Barot, Yoshitoshi Mizuya of Japan, Luis Hong Sanchez of Colombia, Yury Ilyakin of Russia and British-Venezuelan Deirdre Smyth.
Applicants were asked to submit a profile justifying their candidacy, then frog marched through a public online vote after which a selection panel made up of officials from Lenovo and China Daily had the final say. To restrict the winners to one per country and keep the programme as cosmopolitan as possible, two Americans were removed from the final list despite garnering enough votes to secure a place, it said.
Lenovo Group, the worldwide partner of the Olympic torch relay, had organised the campaign from September 7 along with China Daily.
Altogether, 1.5 million persons covering a broad sweep of 156 nationalities visited the campaign web page, the newspaper said.
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