The understated leadership of Manmohan Singh was rare and inspirational

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. A year into his undergraduate degree in economics at Cambridge, Manmohan Singh found his scholarship from Punjab University was not adequate for his expenses there. He occasionally had to resort to skipping meals or making do with a Cadbury’s bar.

He wrote an abject letter to a close friend asking for £12-13 in each of the coming two years. Two months later, a money order for £3 arrived. It was all his friend could afford in the budget-straitened 1950s.

Soon after, the results of Manmohan Singh’s first-year exams made him confident he would receive additional funding from his Oxbridge college. According to Daman Singh’s memoir of her parents’ lives, Strictly Personal, Singh immediately wrote to dissuade his friend from sending any more money. To understand how much India’s economy has changed thanks to Singh’s stint as finance minister, one need only contrast the relative ease with which middle-class and upper middle-class Indians send their children overseas or even travel abroad for destination parties with the deprivations Singh experienced.

Fast forward to the early part of his stint as finance minister. Among the reforms were two successive devaluations of the rupee and a unifying of the exchange rate, paving the way for rupee convertibility on the current account. To look back at the early 90s is to marvel at how an unwieldy coalition government that did not have a majority in Parliament tackled so much so efficiently.