What makes you think I don't know?
The balance of payments crisis was a long time brewing, and books have been written to do it justice.
Heres how it went -
Rajiv Gandhi was murdered in 1991.
That year a "stop gap" intellectual was made Prime Minister, The now un-lamented Narasimha Rao.
He chose Manmohan Singh, a quiet intellectual to be his Finance Minister.
Manmohan was the planner, and Rao the force that allowed him to follow his goals.
Manmohan in turn broke the task down and gave it to several different competent people to implement.
At one point, over 3 days, the devalued the RS by 20%.
Following that he told the new commerce minister, P. Chidambaram, that he wanted to abolish the export subsidy, because the lowered RS was enough of an incentive.
That would have ended his Chidambaram as a commerce minister, since it was his only way to encourage exports. Yet he had to agree in the end.
So he asked if he could also announce a formal trade reform at the same time.
He and Montek Singh worked to demolish the import licensing raj and had only 8 hours to manage it. They settled on an exim scrips, which allowed market forces to help settle currency trades, and removed the bureaucrat from the process.
40 years of red tape, vested interest, a wounded economy, and under the hardest of deadlines they managed to slice off a huge chunk of that.
If you think, the details of that are trivial or obvious, please spend some time to read the document.
When asked, Manmohan Singh said that it was worth doing, and Narasimha Rao signed the bill.
Thats how a good team works. They had a good FM, a PM which was willing to do the task, however reluctantly, and well ordered subordinates.
Other countries have faced easier challenges and failed.
And thats only the dismantling of the export license raj. They dismantled the industry side of the raj. Then they went on to abolish the MRTP act, opened up everything from banking to airlines, allowed foreign investment (remember Coke buying thums up?), reduced tax rates, and on and on.
This happened over 2 years. They didn't have to beyond a point though. They could have said "this is well enough".
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When you say
> Those who have studied Indian Economics will know that liberalization was forced on us.
You make it sound like a trivial task. As if one were breaking an egg.
Ask Russia how it went for them after Yelstin, in contrast. I never saw tanks having to protect our Parliament from a coup.
The theory du jour is to reduce the importance of Manmohan Singh to the reform process. But these reductions first don't understand the role he played in the first place.