Manmohan Singh

Manmohan Singh (born 26 September 1932) is an Indian retired politician, economist, academician and bureaucrat who served as the 13th Prime Minister of India from 2004 to 2014.

He is the third longest-serving prime minister after Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.

A member of the Indian National Congress, Singh was the first Sikh prime minister of India.

He was also the first prime minister since Jawaharlal Nehru to be re-elected after completing a full five-year term.

Singh was born to Gurmukh Singh and Amrit Kaur on 26 September 1932, in Gah, Punjab, British India, into a Sikh family.

He lost his mother when he was very young and was raised by his paternal grandmother, to whom he was very close.

His early schooling was in the Urdu medium, and even as prime minister years later, he wrote his apparently Hindi speeches in the Urdu script, although sometimes he would also use Gurmukhi, a script used to write Punjabi, his mother tongue.

After the Partition of India, his family migrated to Amritsar, India, where he studied at Hindu College, Amritsar.

Born in Gah, West Punjab, in what is today Pakistan, Singh's family migrated to India during its partition in 1947.

He attended Panjab University, then in Hoshiarpur, Punjab, studying Economics and got his bachelor's and master's degrees in 1952 and 1954, respectively, standing first throughout his academic career.

He completed his Economics Tripos at University of Cambridge in 1957.

He was a member of St John's College.

He was a senior lecturer of economics at Panjab University from 1957 to 1959.

During 1959 and 1963, he served as a reader in economics at Panjab University, and from 1963 to 1965, he was an economics professor there.

In 1960, he went to the University of Oxford for his DPhil, where he was a member of Nuffield College.

His 1962 doctoral thesis under the supervision of I.M.D. Little was titled "India's export performance, 1951–1960, export prospects and policy implications", and was later the basis for his book "India's Export Trends and Prospects for Self-Sustained Growth".

After completing his D.Phil., Singh returned to India.

After obtaining his doctorate in economics from Oxford, Singh worked for the UN during 1966–1969.

He subsequently began his bureaucratic career when Lalit Narayan Mishra hired him as an advisor in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.

Then he went to work for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) from 1966 to 1969.

Later, he was appointed as an advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Trade by Lalit Narayan Mishra, in recognition of Singh's talent as an economist.

From 1969 to 1971, Singh was a professor of international trade at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Singh held several key posts in the Government of India, such as Chief Economic Advisor (1972–1976), governor of the Reserve Bank (1982–1985) and head of the Planning Commission (1985–1987).

In 1972, Singh was chief economic adviser in the Ministry of Finance, and in 1976 he was secretary in the Finance Ministry.

In 1980–1982 he was at the Planning Commission, and in 1982, he was appointed governor of the Reserve Bank of India under then finance minister Pranab Mukherjee and held the post until 1985.

In 1991, as India faced a severe economic crisis, the newly elected prime minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao, inducted the apolitical Singh into his cabinet as finance minister.

Over the next few years, despite strong opposition, he carried out several structural reforms that liberalised India's economy.

Singh was never a member of the Lok Sabha but served as a member of the Rajya Sabha, representing the state of Assam from 1991 to 2019 and Rajasthan from 2019 to 2024.

Although these measures proved successful in averting the crisis, and enhanced Singh's reputation globally as a leading reform-minded economist, the incumbent Congress Party fared poorly in the 1996 general election.

Subsequently, Singh was leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha (the upper house of the Parliament of India) during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government of 1998–2004.

In 2004, when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance came to power, its chairperson Sonia Gandhi unexpectedly relinquished the prime ministership to Singh.

His first ministry executed several key legislations and projects, including the National Rural Health Mission, Unique Identification Authority, Rural Employment Guarantee scheme and Right to Information Act.

In a 2005 interview with the British journalist Mark Tully, Singh said about his Cambridge days:

"I first became conscious of the creative role of politics in shaping human affairs, and I owe that mostly to my teachers Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor. Joan Robinson was a brilliant teacher, but she also sought to awaken the inner conscience of her students in a manner that very few others were able to achieve. She questioned me a great deal and made me think the unthinkable. She propounded the left wing interpretation of Keynes, maintaining that the state has to play more of a role if you really want to combine development with social equity. Kaldor influenced me even more; I found him pragmatic, scintillating, stimulating. Joan Robinson was a great admirer of what was going on in China, but Kaldor used the Keynesian analysis to demonstrate that capitalism could be made to work."

After Cambridge, Singh returned to India and served as a teacher at Panjab University.

In 2008, opposition to a historic civil nuclear agreement with the United States nearly caused Singh's government to fall after Left Front parties withdrew their support.

India's economy grew rapidly under his reign.

The 2009 general election saw the UPA return with an increased mandate, with Singh retaining the office of prime minister.

Over the next few years, Singh's second ministry government faced a number of corruption charges over the organisation of the 2010 Commonwealth Games, the 2G spectrum allocation case and the allocation of coal blocks.

After his term ended in 2014 he opted out from the race for the office of the PM during the 2014 Indian general election.