Manmohan Singh, a soft-spoken and cerebral former Indian prime minister who was credited with far-reaching changes that propelled his country’s emergence as an economic powerhouse able to compete with China, died on Thursday in New Delhi. He was 92.

His death was announced in a statement by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, the hospital where he died. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on X, called Mr. Singh one of India’s “most distinguished leaders.”

With his trademark powder-blue turban, Mr. Singh was the first Indian prime minister from the country’s small Sikh minority, which is concentrated in the northern state of Punjab.

Born in what is now Pakistan, he belonged to a generation whose early lives were molded by the mass migrations that followed partition as India won independence in 1947 — the precursor to many tortured decades of ethnic, religious and regional conflicts, punctuated by the assassinations of political leaders.

Such was his fabled reticence that he gave only a handful of news conferences, even as the economy slowed and his government became mired in accusations of scandals related to the allocation of cellphone licenses and coal fields.

Mr. Singh came to public prominence in 1991 when, as finance minister and a former governor of India’s central bank, he oversaw changes that set his vast, turbulent nation of more than 1.1 billion people on a path toward becoming a regional economic dynamo. The changes fueled a huge expansion in white-collar prosperity in a country that nonetheless continued to struggle with extreme poverty.

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