- Lived:
- born in Gah, a village in west Punjab (now in Chakwal district, Pakistan); uprooted by Partition at fourteen; made in Amritsar, Hoshiarpur, Cambridge and Oxford; died in Delhi, aged 92, the city where nearly all the work was done
- Field:
- economics and government — academic economist, central banker, and the finance minister and prime minister of India's economic opening
- The Big Idea:
- In 1991, with India weeks from default, he dismantled the forty-year machinery of permissions that had walled off the economy — and the India you live in, with its highways, phones, software towers and choices, walked out through that door.
- In their words:
- "No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come" — budget speech, 24 July 1991, adapting Victor Hugo
- If you remember one thing:
- The most consequential Indian economic act of the past half-century was performed by the least theatrical man in public life — and he then ran the country for ten years, did large permanent things and presided over large public failures, and left betting that history would judge him more kindly than his own era did. The bet is still open.