India’s former prime minister Manmohan Singh has died at the age of 92

Manmohan Singh, the former Indian prime minister whose economic reforms made his country a global power, has died aged 92, current leader Narendra Modi said.

Modi confirmed Singh’s death and posted on X that India “mourns the loss of one of its most respected leaders.”

Singh was taken to a hospital in New Delhi after he lost consciousness at his home on Thursday, but could not be revived and was pronounced dead at 9:51 p.m. local time, according to a statement from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences.

Singh, who held office from 2004 to 2014, is credited with bringing about an economic recovery in Asia’s fourth-largest economy in his first term, although his second term was marred by slowing growth in later years.

Singh was born in 1932 in the mud village of Gah in what is now Pakistan. He studied economics to find a way to eradicate poverty in the vast country and never held elected office before taking the highest office in the land.

He won scholarships to attend both Cambridge, where he earned his degree in economics, and Oxford, where he completed his doctorate.

Singh has served in a number of senior civilian positions, serving as a central bank governor and also holding various positions at global organizations such as the United Nations.

He was commissioned in 1991 by then Congress Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao to pull India out of the worst financial crisis in its modern history

In his first term, Singh steered the economy through a period of nine percent growth and gave the country the international influence it had long sought.

He also reached a groundbreaking nuclear deal with the US that he said would help India meet its growing energy needs.

Although he is known as “Mr. Clean”, his image suffered a tarnish during his decades in office when a series of corruption cases came to light.

A few months before the 2014 elections, Singh said he would retire after the elections and that Sonia Gandhi’s son Rahul should take his place if the Congress won.

But the Congress collapsed to what was then its worst ever result as the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, led by Modi, won a landslide victory.

Singh – who said historians were kinder to him than contemporary critics – became a vocal critic of Modi’s economic policies and recently warned of the risks that rising communal tensions posed to Indian democracy.