Former Indian Prime Minister Manmóhan Singh has died at the age of 92. He was rushed to a New Delhi hospital on Thursday after he suddenly lost consciousness at home. However, attempts to resuscitate him were not successful. TASR informs about it based on the reports of world agencies.
Singh is considered the architect of India’s economic reform program and the historic nuclear deal with the US. He was one of India’s longest-serving Prime Ministers (2004–2014) and the first Sikh to hold the post, which until then had always been held by majority Hindus.
Singh was praised for his integrity, but his image was later tarnished by corruption allegations against his ministers during his second term in office from 2009-2014. However, he himself was never accused of corruptionwhich is not a given in India, where politicians are repeatedly in the media with bribery scandals.
Manmóhan Singh was born on September 26, 1932 in poor conditions in what is now Pakistan. Thanks to scholarships, he studied economics in India and in Great Britain at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford. He worked as an associate professor at the Punjab University in Chandigarh and at the renowned Delhi School of Economics. From 1971 he worked as an economic adviser at the Ministry of Trade.
As finance minister in 1991, Singh introduced reforms that opened up the economy and moved India towards a capitalist model. This prevented a potential economic crisis.
Singh worked in the opposition between 1998 and 2004. He became Prime Minister in 2004 after the head of the Indian National Congress, Sonia Gandhi, refused the post. One of his greatest achievements is considered to be the signing of an agreement with the US that gave India access to American nuclear technology.
The current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, who succeeded Singh in 2014, saw him on the X Network called him one of the most important politicians. According to him, as Prime Minister, he made great efforts to improve people’s lives and “his wisdom and humility were always visible”.
