Former Prime Minister of India and a world-renowned economist Dr Manmohan Singh celebrates his 90th birthday today. He served as the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) from 1982-1985 and was the Minister of Finance in PV Narasimha Rao’s government. He was one of those responsible for the economic liberalisation of India in 1991. Dr Singh introduced economic reforms that moved India towards liberalisation and ended the ‘license raj’.
On his birthday, here is a look at some of the lesser-known facts about the former Prime Minister.
Although he can speak Hindi, he cannot read the script of the language. Even when he was leading the country, his speeches were written in Urdu because he is proficient in it.
Dr Singh lived in the village Gah (in undivided India) which had no electricity. His family had no access to piped water and school, and he used to walk miles to attend school and he studied in the light of a kerosene lamp.
After the Partition of India in August 1947, Dr Singh and his family migrated to Amritsar where they started life from scratch. He was 14 years old at the time.
Dr Singh was named the Finance Minister of the Year by Euromoney and Asiamoney in 1993.
Dr Manmohan Singh was the first Sikh and the first non-Hindu to become the Prime Minister of India.
When Pt. Jawahar Lal Nehru offered Manmohan Singh to join the government in 1962, he declined as he did not want to dishonour his commitment to teaching at his college in Amritsar.
Dr Singh worked with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development under economist Raul Prebisch, from 1966-1969 but when he got an offer to work as a Lecturer at Delhi School of Economics, he left the UN and came back to India. This was a time when every brilliant economist dreamed of working for the UN.
This habit of Manmohan Singh helped him to respond immediately to the 2004 tsunami crisis, even before the PMO was alerted
