BPSC 70th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 95 of 143

Correct — B, Dhirubhai Ambani. The Bombay Plan, formally 'A Brief Memorandum Outlining a Plan of Economic Development for India', was issued in January 1944 with an expanded two-volume edition in 1945, and it carried exactly eight signatures: J. R. D. Tata, G. D. Birla, Sir Purshottamdas Thakurdas, Ardeshir Dalal, Lala Shri Ram, Kasturbhai Lalbhai, A. D. Shroff and John Mathai. Three of the four options are on that list — Tata, Birla and Shri Ram — so the negative stem resolves the moment you can name the signatories. Dhirubhai Ambani cannot be on it for a reason that needs no list at all: he was born on 28 December 1932 at Chorwad in Junagadh district, Gujarat, and was therefore eleven years old when the memorandum was published. He was working in Aden through the 1950s, returned to India in 1958, began as a yarn trader in a 350-square-foot office in Masjid Bunder, Bombay, and only later built Reliance into a textiles and petrochemicals group; he died on 6 July 2002 and was awarded the Padma Vibhushan posthumously. He belongs to the generation that grew rich under the licence-permit system the Bombay Plan helped inspire, not to the generation that drafted it — a gap of a full working lifetime, which is the cleanest way to hold this question in memory.

• (a)J. R. D. Tata — A genuine signatory, and usually named first among the eight. As chairman of Tata Sons from 1938 he was the most prominent industrialist in the group that drafted the memorandum, and the plan's insistence on heavy industry as the base of development reflects the Tata steel and engineering interests directly.
• (c)G. D. Birla — Also a genuine signatory. Ghanshyam Das Birla was the other giant of the group, a long-time financier of Gandhi and of Congress activity, which is part of why the plan could be presented as nationalist economic thinking rather than merely a business lobby's wish-list.
• (d)Sri Ram — This is Lala Shri Ram of Delhi Cloth and General Mills, a genuine signatory and the least famous of the four names offered — which is exactly why he is the option a candidate is tempted to strike out. Unfamiliarity is not the same as absence from the list.

The Bombay Plan was an attempt by India's leading industrialists to set out what a post-war Indian economy should look like, published while the country was still under colonial rule and while the Congress leadership was in jail after Quit India. It proposed an outlay of about Rs 10,000 crore over fifteen years, with roughly 45 per cent going to industry, aiming to double agricultural output and raise industrial output about fivefold. Its striking feature, given that businessmen wrote it, is how much of the state it wanted: protective tariffs against foreign competition, government regulation of investment, deficit financing, and public-sector enterprises in industries where private capital would not go. That is the intellectual bridge between colonial-era business thinking and the mixed economy independent India actually adopted, and it is why the plan appears in the economic-history section of the syllabus rather than in business history.

Negative-form questions of this kind are best answered by identifying the people who ARE on the list rather than by hunting for the outsider, because the list is short and memorable. But on this question there is an even faster route that needs no list: check the dates. The Bombay Plan is a 1944–45 document; Dhirubhai Ambani was born in 1932. An eleven-year-old cannot be an architect of a national economic plan, so option (b) falls on chronology alone, and the other three can then be confirmed at leisure. That habit — testing each name against the date in the stem before testing it against your memory of a list — will save you on a whole family of history questions. The option set is also period-consistent apart from the answer: Tata, Birla and Shri Ram were all active industrialists of the 1940s, while Ambani belongs to the 1960s onwards.

• The Bombay Plan's eight signatories: J. R. D. Tata, G. D. Birla, Sir Purshottamdas Thakurdas, Ardeshir Dalal, Lala Shri Ram, Kasturbhai Lalbhai, A. D. Shroff and John Mathai
• Published January 1944 as 'A Brief Memorandum Outlining a Plan of Economic Development for India'; a fuller two-volume edition followed in 1945
• Headline targets: about Rs 10,000 crore of investment over fifteen years, roughly 45 per cent of it in industry, with agricultural output to double and industrial output to grow about fivefold
• It asked for state intervention — tariff protection, regulation of investment, deficit financing and public enterprises where private capital was inadequate
• John Mathai, one of the eight, later became Finance Minister of independent India; Ardeshir Dalal joined the Viceroy's Executive Council as member for Planning and Development
• Dhirubhai Ambani: born 28 December 1932 at Chorwad, Gujarat; returned from Aden in 1958 to trade yarn in Bombay; died 6 July 2002; awarded the Padma Vibhushan posthumously

• Striking out the least familiar name — 'Sri Ram' is Lala Shri Ram of DCM and is a real signatory
• Confusing the Bombay Plan (1944, eight industrialists) with the National Planning Committee (1938, chaired by Nehru) or with the People's Plan (1944, M. N. Roy)
• Assuming businessmen must have opposed state control — the Bombay Plan asked for a large planning and regulatory role for the state

BPSC asks this as a named-list recall, usually negatively — 'who was not' — and expects you to know the eight signatories or at least to spot the anachronism. UPSC's treatment of Indian economic planning is conceptual rather than list-based: it asks about the constitutional status of the Planning Commission, about who finally approved a Five Year Plan, or about the model underlying a particular plan, and it has not asked the Bombay Plan's authorship.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The 'People's Plan' of 1944, put forward as an alternative to the Bombay Plan, is associated with which of the following ?

  • (a)M. N. Roy
  • (b)Jayaprakash Narayan
  • (c)S. N. Agarwal
  • (d)M. Visvesvaraya

  Answer(a) M. N. Roy — the People's Plan of 1944 was drafted for the Indian Federation of Labour; the Gandhian Plan of the same year was S. N. Agarwal's and the Sarvodaya Plan of 1950 was Jayaprakash Narayan's.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following signatories of the Bombay Plan later served as Finance Minister of independent India ?

  • (a)A. D. Shroff
  • (b)John Mathai
  • (c)Kasturbhai Lalbhai
  • (d)Ardeshir Dalal

  Answer(b) John Mathai — the economist among the eight signatories, he went on to hold the finance portfolio in the early years after independence.