Wealth & Money Quote by Manmohan Singh

"The Indian economy grew at 5.5 percent, but if you look at the last 30 years - for example, 1960 to 1985 - the progress made by East Asian countries was phenomenal. In a single generation they had been able to transform the character of their economy. They were able to get rid of chronic poverty"

Manmohan Singh, Statesman

About this Quote

A 5.5 percent growth rate is dangled here like a consolation prize: decent, even impressive on paper, but inadequate when set against the moral drama of what growth can accomplish. Manmohan Singh’s move is deliberately comparative. He pulls India out of the comfort of its own metrics and forces it into a tougher league table: East Asia’s post-1960 transformation, where growth wasn’t just higher, it was catalytic enough to rewrite social reality within one lifetime.

The subtext is a rebuke to complacency and a critique of incrementalism. By naming 1960 to 1985, Singh isn’t offering a neutral history lesson; he’s pointing to a policy window when states like South Korea and Taiwan fused export-led industrialization, land reform, mass education, and disciplined governance into a machine for upward mobility. “In a single generation” is doing heavy rhetorical work: it collapses time to make delay feel like choice, not fate.

His most charged phrase is “get rid of chronic poverty.” It’s technocratic language with an ethical edge, implying that poverty’s persistence is not natural but structural - and therefore politically solvable. In the early-1990s Indian context Singh is inseparable from, this comparison reads as an argument for reform with stakes beyond GDP: if East Asia could convert growth into broad-based social change, why should India settle for growth that coexists with entrenched deprivation? The intent isn’t envy; it’s urgency disguised as economics.

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Manmohan Singh (born September 26, 1932) is a Statesman from India.

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