Purshottamdas Thakurdas: The cotton trader whose economic vision India ignored

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them. But the truly unfortunate are those who have greatness snatched away.

Take Purshottamdas Thakurdas, the Gujarati cotton trader and industrialist from Bombay. Had the Indian government followed the blueprint set out in the Bombay Plan of 1944, Thakurdas might have been remembered as the architect of an economic revolution. Read this | Vikram Sarabhai, the cosmic capitalist whose vision encompassed Indian industry The 15-year investment strategy, outlined in January 1944 and initially meant for private circulation, had the potential to set India on a vastly different economic trajectory.

Thakurdas, who condensed it into two pamphlet-sized volumes and published them as A Brief Memorandum Outlining a Plan of Economic Development for India in 1945, could have been hailed as one of its founding fathers. Instead, the Indian government, in its wisdom, chose a different path—one that condemned the country to a miserly rate of growth, later derisively dubbed the "Hindu rate of growth," for the first four decades of independence. The other signatories of the almost-forgotten document—industrialists like J.R.D.

Tata, G.D. Birla, Lala Shriram, and Kasturbhai Lalbhai, as well as public figures like A.D. Shroff and John Mathai—moved on to their primary vocations and earned their spurs in business and finance.

Thakurdas, however, became a footnote. This, despite his many achievements. Born in May 1879 into a wealthy Gujarati bania family that had moved from Surat to Bombay, he lost his father at a young age.