‘Manmohan took challenges in stride, kept pace of growth’

Montek Singh Ahluwalia praised former PM Manmohan Singh's steady leadership amid pressures, highlighting his role in India's economic transformation and key policies.

New Delhi: At the Prime Ministers’ Museum and Library on Thursday, former Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia delivered a detailed lecture on the tenure of former PM Manmohan Singh, tracing his role in India’s economic transformation and the complexities of governance during his decade as Prime

‘Manmohan took challenges in stride, kept pace of growth’

Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh faced multiple pressures but kept the system steady and growth-focused, former Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia said on Thursday, hailing the role of the late leader in India’s economic transformation.

Delivered at the Prime Ministers’ Museum and Library in the Teen Murti Bhavan auditorium as part of the Prime Minister Lecture Series, the lecture was attended by Singh’s wife Gursharan Kaur, NITI Aayog vice chairperson Suman Bery, and Congress leader Gurdeep Singh Sappal.

“He faced multiple pressures—from allies, from within his own party, and from critics on both left and right—but he kept the system steady and growth-focused,” Ahluwalia said.

Ahluwalia described Singh’s career in three phases—economist, reformer, and Prime Minister—arguing that the last phase was shaped as much by political constraints as by policy continuity. “No army on earth can stop an idea whose time has come. And the idea of India as an economic power is one such idea,” he quoted Singh as saying during the reform years of the 1990s.

He noted that the 1991 liberalisation laid a foundation that Singh’s later government sought to sustain rather than reinvent. “I don’t think he could have expected to make a comparable transformational difference in his second period,” Ahluwalia said. “The task then was to ensure that the change continued.”

“Action in that government could not be just a Congress affair. It had to be about keeping the allies together and the Left happy,” he said.

Despite those constraints, Ahluwalia said UPA-I recorded substantial achievements, especially in sustaining growth and building long-term institutional and technological frameworks. He emphasised that Singh resisted calls to move away from growth-oriented policies after the 2004 “India Shining” campaign backfired for the BJP. “Growth is not sufficient, but it is necessary. Without growth, none of the other good things would happen,” he quoted Singh as saying.

The National Common Minimum Programme (NCMP), negotiated with Left support, became a framework for continuity in reform. Ahluwalia highlighted that it targeted a 7–8% growth rate—higher than the 6% achieved earlier—and explicitly backed private participation in infrastructure. “The government didn’t have the money to do it alone. The idea that we should bring in the private sector enabled us to develop new public–private partnership models,” he said.

Among Singh’s landmark decisions, Ahluwalia identified the Indo–U.S. Civil Nuclear Agreement and Aadhaar as two defining legacies — one geopolitical, the other institutional. “It is wrong to think that the test of the nuclear deal is whether we have nuclear reactors,” he said. “It was the ground floor on which subsequent defence and strategic cooperation with the U.S. was built.”