Shroff had been critical of the influence of Soviet academicians over India’s economic
policy.
Answers
Answer:
In 1954, a Bombay economist named A.D. Shroff began a Forum of Free Enterprise,
whose ideas on economic development were somewhat at odds with those then
influentially articulated by the Planning Commission of the Government of India.
Shroff complained against the 'indifference, if not discouragement' with which the
state treated entrepreneurs.
At the same time as Shroff, but independently of him, a journalist named Philip
Spratt was writing a series of essays in favour of free enterprise. Spratt was a
Cambridge communist who was sent by the party in 1920s to foment revolution in
the subcontinent. Detected in the act, he spent many years in an Indian jail. The
books he read in the prison, and his marriage to an Indian woman afterwards,
inspired a steady move rightwards. By the 1950s, he was editing a proAmerican
weekly from Bangalore, called Myslndia. There he inveighed against the economic
policies of the government of India. These, he said, treated the entrepreneur `as a
criminal who has dared to use his brains independently of the state to create wealth
and give employment'. The state's chief planner, P.C. Mahalanobis, had surrounded
himself with Western leftists and Soviet academicians, who reinforced his belief in
`rigid control by the government over all activities'. The result, said Spratt, would be
`the smothering of free enterprise, a famine of consumer goods, and the tying down
of millions of workers to soul-deadening techniques.'