India's Best Student: Dr. Manmohan Singh

Edited By Sanjaya Baru | Updated on Sep 09, 2013 02:16 PM IST

Jitender Gupta/ Outlook Group

WHENEVER he was asked for the secret of his professional success Prime Minister Manmohan Singh would say only one thing, “I am what I am because of my education.”

He has often thanked his family for ensuring that he went right up to college and then had opportunities to win many scholarships that finally helped him get a PhD from Oxford University.

Manmohan Singh was born into a family of modest means in the village of Gah in Pakistan. For the first 12 years of his life he lived there, a village which had no electricity, no school, no hospital, no piped drinking water.

He walked for miles every day to school and studied at night in the dim light of a kerosene lamp. When asked once why he had poor eyesight he confessed that it was because he had spent hours reading books in that dim light.

India's Best Student: Dr. Manmohan Singh


Gah village in Pakistan, where Dr. Singh was born	Nostalgia grips Gah, where some of his friends lovingly display his photograph.	Dr. Singh interacts with some of his childhood friends, from Lahore. His family migrated to Amritsar during the Partition.

Dr. Singh on his way to present a budget. He presented six budgets consecutively

It was his hard work that enabled him to finish his schooling and attend college in Amritsar, where he lived after the Partition. He then won a scholarship to go to Cambridge University in England to do his Master’s in Economics. Another scholarship helped him complete his PhD.

He won the coveted Adam Smith Prize in Economics for his outstanding academic record. He always stood first and was a brilliant student.

For all his brilliance, he was a very shy boy. He once told Mark Tully, the famous BBC correspondent in India, that throughout his stay in Cambridge he used to bathe with cold water because the moment hot water was available in the hostel all the other students would come in to bathe and he felt shy to show them his long hair.

As the only Sikh student in the hostel he felt inhibited to remove his turban in front of others. It is this shy boy who became the darling of his teachers because he was such a good student.

He returned to India to teach at his college in Amritsar. One day, his neighbour, renowned writer Mulk Raj Anand, took him to meet Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Panditji asked him to join the government. But he had a commitment to teach at the college and so he could not accept that offer.

Later, when he was working at the United Nations under the famous economist Raul Prebisch, he got an offer to join Delhi School of Economics as a lecturer. He immediately accepted that invitation and decided to return to India. Dr. Prebisch was shocked. So many brilliant economists would be delighted to get a UN job and this young man was giving it up to teach in India? “You are being foolish,” Prebisch told Manmohan Singh, adding, “But, sometimes in life it is wise to be foolish!”

Dr. Manmohan Singh's house in Gah village

Did you know?

When Dr Singh was the finance minister, he called up Dr. Verghese Kurien, the Chairman of IRMA. He was expecting a discussion on grants/finances.

Instead Dr. Singh politely enquired about his daughter, who was a student at IRMA, and only then Dr. Kurien knew that he had a famous daughter on his institute’s rolls. Humility, it seems, runs through the family.

Manmohan Singh returned home first to teach and then to work in the Government.

He has held every important job in the field of economic policy making in India: Chief Economic Advisor to Government of India, Finance Secretary, Governor, Reserve Bank of India, Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission, Union Finance Minister and now Prime Minister!

In 2005 when he visited Kaula Lumpur for the India-ASEAN Summit he was introduced at the ASEAN Business Forum meeting as “the world’s most qualified Head of Government”!

That is what makes us all proud. No country in the world has a more qualified head of government and India has never had such a highly qualified Prime Minister. Manmohan Singh’s life is a record of excellence and of merit being rewarded. His life will always be an inspiration to young people who want to work hard and achieve something based on their learning.

No rich parents, no influential uncles, no wealth, no inheritance, no one to pull strings and ‘put in a word’ – it was always his merit, his hard work, his honesty, his intelligence and, above all, his deep love for India that energised him. Every young Indian should feel inspired by the life of Manmohan Singh!

Sanjaya Baru served as media advisor to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh from 2004 to 2008, and is currently Editor at Business Standard.

Dr. Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India

ACADEMIC RECORD

1962 D Phil, Nuffield College,
University of Oxford
1957 Economic Tripos [First Class honours], University of Cambridge
1954 MA Economics, Panjab University – First Class, first position in the University
1952 BA Economics (Hons.), Panjab University – Second Class with first
position in the University
1950 Intermediate, Panjab University – First Class with first position in the University
1948 Matriculation, Panjab University – First class

SELECT POSITIONS HELD

May 22, 2004 – till date:
Prime Minister of India

March 21, 1998 – May 22,2004:
Leader of Opposition, Rajya Sabha

June 21, 1991 – May 15, 1996:
Finance Minister of India

March 1991-June 1991: Chairman,
University Grants Commission

December 1990 – March 1991:
Advisor to Prime Minister of India on Economic Affairs

August 1987 – November 1990:
Secretary General and Commissioner, South-South Commission

January 1985 – July 1987:
Dy. Chairman, Planning Commission of India

September 1982 – January 1985: Governor,
Reserve Bank of India

November 1976 – April 1980:
Secretary, Ministry of Finance, Dept. of Economic Affairs, Government of India

1972 – 1976 :Chief Economic Advisor,
Ministry of Finance, India

1971 – 1972 Economic Advisor, Ministry
of Foreign Trade, India

1969 – 1971 Professor of International Trade, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University, India

1966 – 1969 UNCTAD, Chief, Financing
for Trade Section

1963 – 1965 Professor of Economics,
Panjab University

1959-63 Reader in Economics 1957-59:, Panjab University

SELECT HONOURS AND AWARDS

1999 Fellow of the National Academy of
Agricultural Sciences, New Delhi.

1996 Honorary Professor, Delhi School
of Economics, University of Delhi

1995 Jawaharlal Nehru Birth Centenary Award of the Indian Science Congress Association for 1994-95

1994 Elected Distinguished Fellow, London School of Economics, Centre for Asia Economy, Politics and Society

1994 Elected Honorary Fellow, Nuffield
College, University of Oxford, Oxford, U.K.

1994 Honorary Fellow,
All India Management Association

1987 Padma Vibhushan Award by the
President of India

1986 National Fellow, National Institute
of Education, N.C.E.R.T.

1982 Elected Honorary Fellow, St. John’s
College, Cambridge,

1982 Elected Honorary Fellow, Indian
Institute of Bankers

1976 Honorary Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

1957 Elected Wrenbury Scholar, University
of Cambridge, UK

1955 Awarded Wright’s Prize for
distinguished performance

1956 Awarded Adam Smith Prize,
University of Cambridge, UK

1954 Uttar Chand Kapur Medal, Panjab University, for standing first
in MA (Economics), Panjab University, Chandigarh

1952 University Medal for standing First in BA Hons.(Economics),
Panjab University, Chandigarh

HONORARY DOCTORAL DEGREES

Nuffield College, Oxford
Panjab University, Chandigarh

Delhi University, Delhi
University of Bologna, Italy
Osmania University, Hyderabad

University of Roorkee, Roorkee
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada

Prof. Upinder Singh: " We grew up in a house filled with books"

Upinder_photo_2 Prof. Singh teaches Ancient Indian History at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Delhi. In a chat with Bharti M Borah, she shares her experience of growing up as the daughter of Dr. Manmohan Singh.

Q. Was academics an important part of growing up?
A. Definitely, we grew up in a house filled with books. A good education, extensive reading and academics was a large part of growing up for all of us. Doing well in academics was emphasised, along with being independent thinkers and decision makers.

Q. How did your family react to your career decision?
A. Ancient Indian History has always fascinated me, it was a very instinctive decision for me. We were always given advice by our parents, but making a decision was in our hands. We were given the independence to make decisions, but not without taking full responsibility for our decisions in life.

Q. What do you admire most about your father?
A. He is very meticulous, works very, very, hard. That has rubbed off on all of us; whatever we pursued throughout our lives was done very meticulously.

Q. What is one work habit you would like your father to avoid?
A. I wish he would relax a bit more. He is so committed to his work and says it works as a relaxation. But I wish he would take time off, take a break and just relax. But I guess that is difficult to do because of his responsibilities as a public servant.

Q. Among his four roles as a teacher, a researcher, a policy maker and now a law giver, which one do you think he is best suited for?
A. He combines all facets of the four roles he has played in his career into the work he is currently doing. But he does say, “I’ve lost touch with academics. I am an accidental politician.” His intellectual orientation does seep into whichever role he is in terms of work. But, especially in the field of economics, he has a tremendous grasp of the subject due to his academic orientation, something that helps him in the ability to adjust to all the different roles he has played in his career.

Q. What is a life lesson that you have learned from your father?
A. You really have to stand on your own feet, whatever you make of yourself should be yours. None of us took any privilege of his official capacity. The office car was not available to us to the bus stop, he was very strict about it. Personal and official matters were never merged. My father had his share of difficulties while growing up and none of his children ever developed the taste for a luxurious life. Both, my mother and father, always emphasised being responsible for our own needs from childhood. Money, power and position, have never been important to any of us. We all learned to do things ourselves and not rely on help from others.

Q. What about your father’s love for Urdu poetry? One of his classmates said his favourite at that time was Abhi Toh Main Jawan Hu.
A. Really, I never knew that was a number he liked. He does love Urdu poetry, he especially likes the poetry of Bahadur Shah Zafar, classical music and ghazals. He does take time out and listen to music in the mornings. He’s an early riser, a quality that I have also imbibed.