Who among the following Indian capitalist was not the architect of “Bombay Plan” ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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) 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) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2024 Q95 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q95 — History PYQ with Answer