New Delhi: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Friday said his "greatest ambition" was to see a fully-educated and knowledge-empowered India and thanked the nation for making it possible to realise his personal dreams.

"My dreams for myself have been realised in my lifetime because my country made me," Manmohan Singh said at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit at the Taj Palace hotel here, recalling his journey from a small village named Gah, now in Pakistan, to Oxford and to the office of India's prime minister.

"I stand before you today because the light of knowledge has empowered me. I cannot think of any other reason. Like millions of Indians, I come from a family of modest means. I lived in a dusty village with no doctor, no school, no electricity," he said.

"It was the burning desire to learn, to be educated, that has brought me here to these glittering halls from that village without hope. It was scholarship and fair selection that educated me. It was a free society and a land of opportunity that employed me," he said, adding he wanted the same dream getting realised for every Indian.

"My greatest ambition for the coming century is to see a fully educated India," he said, while also exuding confidence that "India will not only be the land of a free people, but of a knowledge-empowered people." IANS