Manmohan Singh

Biography

Manmohan Singh was born in 1932 in Gah, in Punjab in British India, to a Sikh family that moved to India at Partition. He studied economics at Panjab University, took the economics tripos at Cambridge (St John's College) in 1957, and completed a DPhil at Nuffield College, Oxford, in 1962. He taught economics at Panjab University and then worked for the UN Conference on Trade and Development from 1966 to 1969.

He joined the Indian government as an adviser and held senior economic posts: chief economic adviser (1972-1976), governor of the Reserve Bank of India (1982-1985) and head of the Planning Commission (1985-1987). In 1991 Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao made him finance minister, and his budget that July launched reforms that opened India's economy to trade and private investment.

He sat in the Rajya Sabha from 1991 to 2024 and led the opposition there from 1998 to 2004. After the Congress-led alliance won the 2004 election, Sonia Gandhi declined the premiership and Singh became prime minister, the first Sikh in the office. His government passed a rural employment guarantee and a right-to-information law and concluded a civil nuclear agreement with the United States. Re-elected in 2009, his second term was hurt by corruption scandals, and he stepped down in 2014. He died in New Delhi in December 2024.