Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister with a vision for nation's growth

With the reforms of 1991, former prime minister Manmohan Singh not only pulled India back from the brink of bankruptcy but also helped the country strut the global stage as a rising economic power.

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His policies bore imprints of his early academic insights, experts say.

Singh received his DPhil from Oxford University's Nuffield College in 1962 under the guidance of Prof Ian Little, an emeritus fellow at Nuffield and one of Britain's foremost economists.

It's no coincidence that Singh found his guru in Little, who had played a key role in India's policy making. A lesser-known fact about "commanding heights" of India's socialist-era planning is that the erstwhile Planning Commission worked closely with US and British economists to formulate its early five-year plans. This is contrary to the notion that India's planning was an insular Soviet-style centralised exercise.