India's forgotten blueprint for growth

At the outset, Bombay Plan is undoubtedly a far more thorough, comprehensive and honest economic document than we see from the industry associations of today

The Bombay Plan

Blueprint for economic resurgence

Sanjaya Baru and Meghnad Desai (Eds)

Rupa Publications

364 pages; Rs 500

It was the mid-nineties. I had joined the National Council of Applied Economic Research some time earlier and was working on Indian industrial reforms. Prakash Tandon, the first Indian chairman of Hindustan Lever, used to frequent the library and would often answer my queries on industry and how it was affected by the reforms. Visibly excited, he once asked me what I knew about the Bombay Plan. I vaguely knew it was put together by industry in the 1940s, and called for a mixed economy. You