In 1991, Manmohan Singh was finance minister of a struggling, fractious government that was running out of money and ideas. Under pressure from international lenders, he championed a sweeping program of economic reform that took some selling to his own government, as well as to big business, who worried that they would lose ground to foreign competitors. Singh persevered, and those reforms set the stage for the beginning of the â??rising Indiaâ? story.
Twenty years later, Manmohan Singh is prime minister of a struggling, fractious coalition government facing a new set of challengesâ??soaring inflation, allegations of corruption, slowing growth and burdensome public debt. But this time, Singhâ??s attempt to continue the 1991 economic reforms by opening up Indiaâ??s retail sector more fully to foreign direct investment (FDI) have not fared so well.
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