The achievements of Manmohan Singh, who died at the age of 92 on December 26 2024, make him one of the most important policymakers of our era. Today’s economically dynamic India is his legacy. Almost as significant is the example he gave of intelligent, informed and honourable public service. Singh took ideas seriously, yet was unfailingly courteous and open to the ideas of others. I had the privilege of knowing him from 1974, when I was a senior economist in the World Bank’s India Division and he was the government of India’s chief economic adviser. He was one of the greatest men I have known.
Singh’s most important achievements as a policymaker were made during his years as finance minister from 1991 to 1996. He was appointed, to his surprise, by prime minister PV Narasimha Rao, at a time of a huge foreign exchange crisis. Cometh the hour; cometh the man. He seized the opportunity to deliver radical reform of an anti-trade and anti-market policy regime that had crippled India’s economy since independence. He had known of these errors since he wrote India’s Export Trends, his doctoral thesis at Oxford, published in 1964.
With the prime minister’s backing, Singh duly transformed India’s policy regime. The reforms ultimately included radical trade liberalisation, deregulation of industry, liberalisation of finance and a shift to a more modern monetary regime, without direct monetary financing of the government by the Reserve Bank of India.