BOOKS: THE BOMBAY PLAN
After Gandhi told the British on August 9, 1942, to quit India, the entire Congress leadership was put behind bars; the British gave a strong message that they would continue to rule India. Italy surrendered to the Allies on September 3, 1943. On December 26, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek met in Cairo and agreed on a joint strategy against Japan. Two days later, Roosevelt and Churchill met Stalin in Teheran and agreed on a strategy against Germany. Allied victory was in sight. Since the beginning of their alliance, Roosevelt had been pressing Churchill to grant independence to India after the war. Churchill hated the prods; he had every intention to retain India as a colony.
Bombay House in a lane off Flora Fountain in South Bombay has been the headquarters of the Tata empire since 1924. There, Jehangir Ratanji Dorabji Tata, the scion who headed the business house from 1938 till his death in 1993, got together a few friends in 1944, including some of India’s leading industrialists. They wrote up the Bombay Plan; it laid out how to develop India over 15 years. The British were determined to stay; the Bombay Plan was a nudge to them to develop India, and offered ideas for it. The Congress rebels were all behind bars; they were irrelevant to the Bombay Plan.
The government of British India took only perfunctory interest in the Plan. It was forgotten almost as soon as it was drafted. The government of independent India prepared and implemented its first five-year plan in 1951, but it never recognised or mentioned the Bombay Plan. Now, Baron Desai of St Clement Danes, and Sanjaya Baru, who created the Accidental Prime Minister, have put together a collection of papers to celebrate it.
There is much discussion in the book about why India’s planners did not mention the Bombay Plan. It is misdirected. The Bombay Plan was completely forgotten: there is no evidence that anyone connected with the first five-year plan, which was framed seven years after the Bombay Plan, ever gave it a thought. The fiveyear plan was largely put together by Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI); Pitambar Pant, whom Mahalanobis sent to Delhi, got together a bunch of young men, mostly from the ISI and Delhi School of Economics, and made up the plan. Sir John Mathai, who participated in the drafting of the Bombay Plan, was the railway minister in the first cabinet after Independence, but he soon resigned in disgust with Mahalanobis, and had no influence on the five-year plan.
The most important contribution of this book is the Bombay Plan itself, which sees light of day for the first time after 1944. It is in two parts of 99 and 48 paragraphs, respectively. The first one deals with production, and the second one with distribution and the role of the state. The planners meant to bring out a third part on income distribution and state control. They did not, which is a clear indication that they gave up.
P. S. Lokanathan wrote on the Bombay Plan in Foreign Affairs soon after its publication. He was doubtful whether the British government would take it up after the war, but hoped that the US would adopt and finance it. It did not. The Plan turned out to be a non-starter; its most substantial contribution is this book.
The government of British India took only perfunctory interest in the Plan. It was forgotten as soon as it was drafted. The government of independent India never recognised or mentioned the Bombay Plan