1. B. Morarji Desai
Morarji Ranchhodji Desai (29 February 1896 – 10 April 1995) was an
Indian independence activist and served as the 4th Prime Minister of India between 1977 and 1979.
Following the sudden demise of Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, Desai
was a strong contender for the position of Prime Minister, only to be defeated
by Indira Gandhi in 1966. He was appointed as Deputy Prime Minister and
Minister of Finance in Indira Gandhi's cabinet, until 1969. He resigned from
the Congress during the split of 1969, and joined the INC (O). After the
controversial emergency was lifted in 1977, the political parties of the
opposition fought together against the Congress, under the umbrella of the
Janata Party, and won the 1977 election. Desai was elected Prime Minister, and
became the first non-Congress Prime Minister of India at the age of 81. (till
date the oldest person to become PM of India and the oldest to become the Prime
Minister of a country for the first time – Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad became
the oldest Prime Minister of a Country at the age of 92 in 2018, but it was his
second stint in the post)
As the Finance Minister of India in two stints (1959-1964, 1967-1969), Morarji
Desai has presented eight annual and two interim budgets, the maximum number of
budgets presented by any so far. He also had the rare opportunity to present
two budgets on his birthday in 1964 and in 1968 (leap years) as he was born on
February 29.
2. B.
Navodaya Vidyalaya
Navodaya
Vidyalayas or Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas (JNVs) is a system of alternate
schools specifically tasked with finding talented children in rural areas of
India and providing them with an education equivalent to the best residential
school system, without regard to their families' socio-economic condition. They
are run by Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti, New Delhi, an autonomous organization
under the Department of School Education and Literacy, Ministry of Human
Resource Development, Government of India. JNVs are fully residential and
co-educational schools affiliated to Central Board of Secondary Education
(CBSE), New Delhi, with classes from VI to XII standard.
The idea of
Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas was conceived by former Prime Minister of India
Rajiv Gandhi. The concept of opening a JNV in every district of India was born
as a part of the National Policy on Education, 1986 with an aim of providing
excellence coupled with social justice. Subsequently, Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti
(NVS) was registered as a society under the Societies Registration Act, 1860.
Rajiv Ratna Gandhi (20 August 1944 – 21 May 1991) who served as the 6th Prime Minister of India from 1984 to
1989 after the assassination of his mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in
1984, was the youngest Indian Prime Minister at the age of 40. A professional
pilot for the state-owned Indian Airlines, Rajiv reluctantly entered politics in
1980 at the behest of Indira after death of Sanjay Gandhi, his brother in a
plane crash.
After assassination of Indira Gandhi on 31st October, 1984, he
led Congress party in December that year to win the largest Lok Sabha majority
to date, 411 seats out of 542. But Rajiv Gandhi's period in office was mired in
controversies; perhaps the greatest crises were the Bhopal disaster, Bofors
scandal and the Shah Bano case. In 1988, he reversed the coup in Maldives, sent
peacekeeping troops to Sri Lanka in 1987 leading to open conflict with the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). In mid-1987, the Bofors scandal
damaged his corruption-free image and resulted in a major defeat for his party
in the 1989 election.
Rajiv Gandhi remained Congress President until the elections in 1991.
While campaigning for the elections, he was assassinated by a suicide bomber
from the LTTE on 21 May 1991 at Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu.
3. D. P. V. Narasimha Rao
“Pamulaparthi Venkata Narasimha Rao” (28 June 1921 – 23 December 2004) who
served as the 9th Prime Minister of India from 1991 to 1996 (also the first
belonging to the southern part of India) is often referred to as the
"Father of Indian Economic Reforms". He employed Dr. Manmohan Singh (a
non-political economist and future prime minister) as his Finance Minister to
embark on historic economic transition. With Rao's mandate, Dr. Singh launched
India's globalisation angle of the reforms that implemented the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) policies to rescue the almost bankrupt nation from economic
collapse.
Apart from an excellent command over Telugu and Marathi, Rao was also
fluent in Hindi, Oriya, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Sanskrit, Tamil, Urdu,
English, French, Arabic, Spanish, German, Greek and Persian.
4. B. Lal Bahadur Shastri
Lal Bahadur Shastri, the 2nd Prime Minister of India who led the country
during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, was conferred with India’s highest civilian
award “Bharat Ratna” in 1966 posthumously after his mysterious death on 11th
January, 1966 at Tashkent (then a city in erstwhile USSR, presently capital city
of Uzbekistan) the day after signing the Tashkent Peace Agreement with Pakistan
(Tashkent Declaration). Shastri was the
first person to be awarded “Bharat Ratna” posthumously. Later in 1991, Rajiv
Gandhi, former Prime Minister of India was conferred with “Bharat Ratna”
posthumously after his assassination in the same year.
5. B. Atal
Bihari Vajpayee
Atal
Bihari Vajpayee (25 December 1924 – 16 August 2018) an politician, statesman
and a poet, served three terms as the Prime Minister of India, first for a term
of 13 days in 1996, then for a period of 13 months from 1998 to 1999, and
finally, for a full term from 1999 to 2004. A member of the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP), he was the first Indian prime minister who was not a member of the
Indian National Congress party to have served a full five-year term in office.
Vajpayee
who remained a bachelor his entire life, was a noted poet, writing in Hindi.
His published works include "Kaidi kavirai ki kundalian", a collection of poems
written when he was imprisoned during the 1975–77 emergency, Amar Aag Hai
(1994), Meri Ikyavana Kavitaem (1995) (some of these poems were set to music by
Jagjit Singh for his album “Samvedna”), Kya Khoya Kya Paya: Atal Bihari
Vajapeyi, Vyaktitva Aur Kavitaem (1999).
Atal
Bihari Vajpayee was conferred with “Bharat Ratna”, the highest civilian award
of India in 2015.
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