India's great economic reformer shrugged off the phone call that made him finance minister
In June 1991 P. V. Narasimha Rao sent word that he wanted the economist Manmohan Singh as finance minister. Singh assumed it was not serious. The next morning an irritated Rao tracked him down and ordered him to dress and appear for the swearing-in. That, Singh later joked, was how his political career began.
The country he took over was nearly broke. The fiscal deficit stood close to 8.5 percent of output, and foreign reserves had shrunk to barely a billion US dollars, enough to cover about two weeks of imports. Much of his own party resisted change, so Singh and P. Chidambaram argued that without deregulation the economy would collapse. Rao backed them.
The irony was that Singh had helped design the older, state-directed system. Now he dismantled the licence raj, the web of permits that had choked private business, cut import taxes, loosened barriers to foreign investment and began privatising state companies. Chidambaram later likened his role to Deng Xiaoping's in China. By 2009 India's reserves had climbed to about 600 billion dollars.
The path there was long and academic. Born on 26 September 1932 in Gah, now in Pakistan, into a Sikh family of dried-fruit traders, he lost his mother young and was raised by his grandmother. The family crossed to India at partition in 1947. He topped his classes at Panjab University, took the economics tripos at Cambridge, where Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor shaped his thinking, and earned an Oxford doctorate on Indian exports. He went on to serve as chief economic adviser, governor of the Reserve Bank and deputy chairman of the Planning Commission. Even as a leader he wrote his Hindi speeches in Urdu script, the language of his schooling.
In 2004 Sonia Gandhi unexpectedly passed the premiership to him, making him India's first Sikh prime minister. He served until 2014, the first since Nehru to be reappointed after a complete five-year term, though his second term was dogged by scandals. He died on 26 December 2024.
Source: Manmohan Singh
