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Manmohan Singh

Manmohan Singh (26 September 1932-26 December 2024) was Prime Minister of India from 22 May 2004 to 26 May 2014, succeeding Atal Bihari Vajpayee and preceding Narendra Modi.

Biography[]

Manmohan Singh was born in Gah, Punjab (in present-day Pakistan) in 1932, and he and his Sikh family migrated to Haldwani, India after the partition of India. He studied at Cambridge and Oxford before working for the United Nations as an economist and becoming a bureaucrat with the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. He served as Chief Economic Advisor from 1972 to 1976, Governor of the Reserve Bank from 1982 to 1985, and head of the Planning Commission from 1985 to 1987. In 1991, Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao inducted Singh into his cabinet as finance minister, and Singh oversaw economic liberalization that helped avert India's economic crisis and built upon Singh's reputation as a reform-minded economist. He concurrently served as a member of the Rajya Sabha for Assam from 1991 to 2019 and for Rajasthan from 2019 to 2024. After the Indian National Congress was defeated at the 1996 general election, Singh became the leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha from 1998 to 2004. In 2004, INC leader Sonia Gandhi stepped aside following her party's victory to enable Singh to become prime minister, and he oversaw rural health and employment schemes and a civil nuclear agreement with the United States while also co-founding BRICS to aid India's economic growth. In 2014, he opted out of the race for prime minister. He remained in the Rajya Sabha until April 2024, and he died that December.

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