Former Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh died on Thursday at the age of 92. Singh was admitted to the emergency ward of Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) around 8 p.m. In April, the veteran Congress leader retired from the Rajya Sabha after a remarkable 33-year tenure in the Upper House.
Dr. Manmohan Singh is survived by his wife, Gurcharan Singh, and their three daughters; he was the Prime Minister of India from 2004 to 2014.
Singh, finance minister under then prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, is often credited for the economic reforms of 1991, which dragged India back from the jaws of bankruptcy. The reform measures opened a new chapter of economic liberalisation and changed India’s economic path in the future. Some excerpts from Manmohan Singh’s budget speech 1991 are:
The Economic Crisis
“We have been at the edge of a precipice since December 1990 and more so since April 1991. The foreign exchange crisis constitutes a serious threat to the sustainability of growth processes and the orderly implementation of our development programmes. Due to a combination of unfavourable internal and external factors, inflationary pressures on the price level have increased substantially since mid-1990.”
He added, “The people of India have to face double-digit inflation, which hurts the poorer sections of our society the most. In sum, the crisis in the economy is both acute and deep. We have not experienced anything similar in the history of independent India.”
“There is no time to lose. Neither the government nor the economy can live beyond its means year after year. The room for maneuver, to live on borrowed money or time, does not exist anymore. Any further postponement of macroeconomic adjustment, long overdue, would mean that the balance of payments situation, now exceedingly difficult, would become unmanageable and inflation, already high, would exceed limits of tolerance.”
Path To Recovery
“For improving the management of the economy, the starting point, and indeed the centre-piece of our strategy, should be a credible fiscal adjustment and macroeconomic stabilisation during the current financial year, to be followed by continued fiscal consolidation thereafter. This process would, inevitably, need at least three years, if not longer, to complete. But there can be no adjustment without pain. The people must be prepared to make necessary sacrifices to preserve our economic independence and restore the health of our economy.”
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