Carney is yet to make his mark; Manmohan Singh made his long ago

Indeed, the parallels between the paths taken by Singh and Carney are uncanny. 

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Both pursued higher studies in Economics at Oxford University and went on to get their doctorate degree from Nuffield College: Singh in the early 1960s and Carney in the early 1990s. In age, they’re 33 years apart. Both served as the heads of their respective central banks. Manmohan Singh was the 15th governor of the Reserve Bank of India (1982-85). Carney, the head of two central banks, was the eighth governor of the Bank of Canada (2008-2013) and then the 120th governor of the Bank of England (2013-2020), the first non-Briton in its history of more than three centuries to lead it. 

While Singh came from India’s Planning Commission to head RBI, Carney served as deputy governor in the Bank of Canada before returning to head it after a brief stint as senior associate deputy minister at the department of finance. Carney worked in the private sector—at Goldman Sachs—while Singh was an out-and-out public-sector man.

As central bank heads, both faced challenging times. Singh oversaw the transition from a very regimented system to a more market-friendly one through comprehensive legal reforms of banking. Carney had to deal with the global financial crisis while heading Canada’s central bank and then with the fallout of Brexit and the early years of covid during his tenure at Britain’s. 

That’s not all. 

Also Read: Montek Singh Ahluwalia on Manmohan Singh: A wise, gentle and persuasive leader who made a huge difference

Their political careers were more accidental than planned, earning one of them, Singh, the sobriquet ‘accidental PM.’ But for Donald Trump’s election victory in the US and his outrageous call for Canada to become America’s 51st state, Carney would probably have remained a private citizen. 

Likewise, but for the elevation of Rao as the ninth PM of India, Singh might have returned to his first love, academia. As Singh reportedly told journalist Mark Tully in 2005, “On the day [that Rao] was formulating his cabinet, he sent his principal secretary to me saying, ‘The PM would like you to become the minister of finance.’ I didn’t take it seriously. [Rao] eventually tracked me down the next morning, rather angry, and demanded that I get dressed up and come to Rashtrapati Bhavan for the swearing-in. So that’s how I started in politics.” 

But there are differences as well. 

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Singh was a seasoned 71 when he became PM, Carney has just turned 60. When Singh took over as India’s PM in 2004, he did not have to worry about elections. The Congress Party was in the driver’s seat, albeit in a coalition government. Although Singh remained a Rajya Sabha member throughout his political career (his sole attempt to win a Lok Sabha seat in 1999 ended in defeat), he could get down to work immediately. 

In contrast, Carney has to face elections, expected to be called soon. Worse, he must lead his country through one of its toughest challenges yet—an escalating trade war with its biggest trading partner, the US.

Manmohan Singh passed away in December 2024 and is now part of history. If his greatest achievement as FM was in seeing through reforms in a host of areas, his greatest contribution as PM was perhaps the India-US Civil Nuclear Agreement that ended our pariah status among nuclear powers. As for Mark Carney, history is still in the making.