Manmohan Singh: The quiet reformer who reshaped India’s economic destiny

former professor of international trade stood before Parliament and borrowed from Victor Hugo: "No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come. India is now wide awake."The life that produced that moment was itself a story of improbable journeys. Born in Gah, a village in Punjab now across the border in Pakistan, into a family of dried fruit traders, Singh lost his mother young and was raised by his paternal grandmother.

When the Partition tore the subcontinent apart in 1947, the family fled to Amritsar. He was fifteen.That rupture sharpened his resolve. He earned his economics degrees from Panjab University, then won a scholarship to St John’s College, Cambridge, graduating with a First in economics.

Among his teachers were Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor, who pulled him in opposite directions. Robinson believed the state had to play an activist role if development was to coexist with equity. Kaldor argued that capitalism, properly managed, could be made to work.

Between these poles, Singh fashioned the ability to hold two opposing ideas simultaneously and still act.He then went to Oxford’s Nuffield College, where his 1962 doctoral thesis, and the book that followed, India’s Export Trends and the Prospects for Self-Sustained Growth, argued that India’s inward-looking trade policy was a trap. Three decades passed before he could spring it.The intervening years were spent accumulating experience and the trust of power. He served the UN Conference on Trade and Development from 1966 to 1969, taught at the Delhi School of Economics, and then entered government as chief economic adviser in 1972.