MONITORING (SW) – People in India are reflecting on former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s contribution to the country since his death on Thursday evening.
Singh, who held the top post for two consecutive terms between 2004 and 2014, was seen as an architect of India’s economic liberalisation which changed the country’s growth trajectory.
The first prime minister since Jawaharlal Nehru to return to power, Singh was also the first Sikh to assume the top office.
Known as a soft-spoken technocrat, he had earlier headed India’s central bank, served as a finance secretary and minister, and led the opposition in the upper house of parliament, reported BBC.
Here are five milestones from Singh’s life that shaped his career and had a lasting impact on more than a billion Indians.
Singh was appointed finance minister in 1991 by the Congress party-led government under Prime Minister PV Narsimha Rao.
India’s economy at the time was facing a serious financial crisis, with the country’s foreign reserves at a dangerously low level, barely enough to pay for two weeks of imports.
He was famously quoted as saying in parliament during his first budget speech in 1991 that “no power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come”.
Later, as prime minister, Singh continued to build on his economic reform measures, lifting millions of Indians out of poverty and contributing to India’s rise as one of the world’s fastest-growing major economies.
Singh signed a historic deal with the US in 2008 to end India’s nuclear isolation after its 1998 testing of the weapon system.
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