Montek Singh Ahluwalia

Montek Singh Ahluwalia is an Indian economist and civil servant, born on 24 November 1943, who served as deputy chairman of the Planning Commission of India from 2004 to 2014, a post carrying the rank of a cabinet minister, and before that as the first director of the International Monetary Fund's Independent Evaluation Office, from 2001 to 2004. He is a central figure of India's economic-reform era, was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian honour, in 2011, and is included here as a named contemporary of this group's subjects in the queue of modern figures. ^{1 2}

The sources disagree about his birthplace: the English article gives Rawalpindi in both its infobox and its early-life text, while the Hindi article and Wikidata give New Delhi. His birth date, 24 November 1943, is agreed by all of them. ^{1 3 2}

Ahluwalia was born the son of Jagmohan Singh, a clerk with the Defence Accounts Department, and Pushp Kaur. He was educated at St Patrick's High School, Secunderabad, and at Delhi Public School, Mathura Road, in Delhi, and graduated with a BA (Hons) in economics from St Stephen's College, Delhi. A Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford, he read philosophy, politics and economics at Magdalen College and then took an MPhil at St Antony's College; while at Oxford he was president of the Oxford Union. The Hindi article adds that he was born into a Punjabi Kalal family. ^{1 3}

The Hindi article's infobox records his religion as Sikhism. No other source read attests his affiliation — the English and Urdu articles are silent and Wikidata has no religion value — and this museum's faith vocabulary contains no Sikh value, so the attestation is preserved here and in his data record's faith note rather than recorded as a value. ^{3 2}

After Oxford, Ahluwalia joined the World Bank in 1968 and at twenty-eight became the youngest division chief in its bureaucracy, in charge of the Income Distribution Division of its Development Research Centre. Returning to India in 1979, he served as economic adviser in the Ministry of Finance and then in a succession of senior posts — special secretary to the prime minister, commerce secretary, secretary of the Department of Economic Affairs, and finance secretary — before joining the Planning Commission as a member in 1998. At the IMF he supervised several studies critical of aspects of the Fund's functioning. As deputy chairman of the Planning Commission from June 2004 to May 2014 he supervised the Eleventh and Twelfth Five-Year Plans. He co-authored Redistribution with Growth (1974) and in February 2020 published his memoir Backstage: The Story Behind India's High Growth Years. He is now a distinguished fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress in New Delhi. ¹

Ahluwalia was married to the economist Isher Judge Ahluwalia, who died in 2020; they had two children. ¹

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