Manmohan Singh, a soft-spoken scholar of economics, who defeated poverty with education to rise to the highest echelon of politics, and transformed the Indian economy by unshackling growth as finance minister before becoming the country’s first Sikh prime minister, died in New Delhi on Thursday night. He was 92. Manmohan Singh, then India’s finance minister, in a photo from October 24, 1991. (HT Archive) Singh served with distinction as the deputy chief of the erstwhile Planning Commission and governor of the Reserve Bank of India before completing a landmark tenure as a Union finance minister who unveiled watershed reforms in 1991 that inaugurated India’s journey as a major world economy. The country’s 14th prime minister is survived by his wife, Gursharan Kaur, and three daughters Upinder Singh, Daman Singh, and Amrit Singh. “With profound grief, we inform the demise of former prime minister of India, Dr Manmohan Singh, aged 92,” said a press statement by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, where the ailing leader was admitted earlier in the day with complications. The …