The Miss World Pageant for 2008 was held in South Africa.Contestants from 108 countries took part in the competition.Miss Russia Kseniya Sukhinova was elected the winner.Miss India Parvathi Omanakkuttan became the first runner up followed by Gabrielle Walcott of Trinidad and Tobago. South Africa and Angola were the other two nations to feature in the top five. All the contestants had spent 30 days in South Africa before the final event. The final was a star-studded ceremony,and was the biggest television event for the year 2008.

Sukhinova, who in a biography on the Miss World website listed becoming a supermodel as a goal, also had won the contest's top model award and was third in the swimsuit competition. Sukhinova, 5' 10", said that her immediate ambitions included meeting Russia's president Dmitry Medvedev. She is a student of Tyumen State Oil and Gas University, she is enrolled in the Bachelor of Science program, majoring in Engineering.

The 21-year-old Parvathy, who hails from Kottayam in Kerala, narrowly missed out on joining five Indian glamour queens Reita Faria (1966), Aishwarya Rai-Bachchan (1994), Diana Hayden (1997), Yukta Mookhey (1999) and Priyanka Chopra (2000) who had won the title.