Singh was excellent at identifying young talent, most famously Montek Singh Ahluwalia. Before Montek and Isher Judge would go on to marry, they met Manmohan Singh in Delhi in 1970. At the time, Singh was a professor at the Delhi School of Economics, known for his work on India’s exports. He seemed too soft-spoken and erudite for the couple to imagine him joining the Ministry of Foreign Trade as an economic advisor just a year later. Over the years, Singh offered suggestions to Isher Judge for her macro-econometric model of the Indian economy, which formed the basis of her doctoral thesis at MIT under Stanley Fischer.
During his tenure as chief economic advisor (CEA) to the Government of India, Singh’s relationship with Ahluwalia deepened. Their conversations in Washington D.C., where Ahluwalia worked at the World Bank, became more frequent. When the position of economic advisor at the Finance Ministry opened, Singh saw an opportunity. He guided Ahluwalia into the bureaucracy, marking their transition from mentor and mentee to colleagues.
A worthy protégé, Ahluwalia drafted the famous blueprint for the first stage of reforms in 1991—dubbed the M-Document. Like Singh, he went on to become finance secretary and, later, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission. Ahluwalia was just one among dozens of economists that Singh mentored. But this cycle of mentorship, that Singh set in motion, would repeat well beyond his years in office. Ahluwalia recruited the next generation of talent, most notably Raghuram Rajan.
Here is much more from Shruti Rajagopalan, Shreyas Narla, and Kadambari Shah. Basically you should take the biggest countries in this world and try to know them reasonably well. And here is a very good sentence, relevant for social change virtually everywhere:
“Singh understood that lasting change comes not from solitary genius, but from creating ecosystems of excellence that outlast any individual.”
And here Tanner Greer visits India.
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