Former Prime Minister of India

Coming from newly built Pakistan, I never thought I would be PM

My father, Sardar Gurmukh Singh, was a clerk and my mother, Sardarni Amrit Kaur, was a homemaker. I was born in Gah on 26 September 1932. After my birth, my parents took me to Panja Sabhi, Hasan Abdal. When the priest opened the Guru Granth Sahib, the first word on the page began with M, so I was named Manmohan.

My mother passed away when I was a child, so my grandmother raised me and I was very much attached to her. After studying some years in a school in village Gah, I attended Khalsa High School for Boys, Peshawar, where I participated in a debate and, though I was not good in sports, I loved playing Hockey and Football.

When I was 11, my father remarried. I was not comfortable with this idea until I met my step-mother, Sitawanti Kaur, who was very warm and affectionate towards me.

On 14 August 1945 – after the end of World War II – sweets were distributed in our school, but I protested on the pretext that India was yet to get its freedom from Britain. When finally we were an independent nation, we were also divided into two. With riots all around, we shifted to Amritsar. There I studied at Hindu College, and later attended Panjab University, Chandigarh, to study BA (Hons) and MA in Economics. After my master’s degree in 1954, I studied Economics Tripos from the University of Cambridge. During that time, I was also a member of St John’s College.

My stay at Cambridge was a transformational phase of my life. I remember my teachers, Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor, making me think the unthinkable with their questions. When I returned to India in 1957, I joined Panjab University as a Senior Lecturer.

In 1958, my parents arranged a match for me to get married. The first question I asked Gursharan was her rank in high school. She was born in Jalandhar on 13 September 1937 and had four sisters and a younger brother. We got married on 14 September 1958.

In 1960, I went to England once again to attend Nuffield College, University of Oxford, for DPhil. My thesis at the doctorate was ‘India’s export performance, 1950–1960, export prospects and policy implications’. It later became the basis for my book India’s Export Trends and Prospects for Self-Sustained Growth (Clarendon Press, 1964).

I returned to India in 1966 and worked for the UNCTAD until I joined Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, as a professor in 1969. However, I could continue till 1971 only. For the next two decades, I was the Chief Economic Adviser, Secretary in the Ministry of Finance, Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, Secretary General of the South Commission, Advisor to Prime Minister of India on Economic Affairs and Chairman of the University Grants Commission until 1991 when I joined politics.