British Indian think-tank launches Manmohan Singh Memorial Lecture

A think-tank dedicated to British Indian research and outreach launched a Manmohan Singh Memorial Lecture series in the Houses of Parliament complex in London, with the inaugural address this week delivered by economist Montek Singh Ahluwalia.

The 1928 Institute, also the Secretariat of the India All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG), invited Ahluwalia to share his insights as a close associate and former deputy chairman of the Planning Commission in the government led by former prime minister Manmohan Singh between 2004 and 2014.

Welsh Indian MP Kanishka Narayan introduced the lecture on Tuesday evening as a timely intervention when India-UK relations are at a high with the recently concluded Free Trade Agreement (FTA) negotiations.

“The Indo-UK FTA is a good signal; I haven't seen the details, and we won't know those until all is fully out, but it is the first deep FTA signed with a major country,” said Ahluwalia.

“We are doing something similar, hopefully with the European Union, and there are bilateral discussions going on with the United States. But all this is uncertain. We don't actually know how quickly this will resolve itself,” he said.

Reflecting upon his time as an adviser in the Manmohan Singh government, the former World Bank official described the former prime minister as a “quintessential scholar” who went out of his way to make people understand why certain actions were essential.

“The real tribute to Dr Manmohan Singh is that successive governments, more or less, continued in the same tradition, not quick and radical (economic) reform but clear directional shift and gradual reform,” he said.

“Today, India's economy has developed a momentum which could transform it into what is called a developed economy by 2047. What this means is that the growth rate has to go up from 6.5 to around 8 per cent. India is doing well at the moment, in the sense that 6.5 per cent still makes it the fastest growing emerging market,” he noted.