A.D. Shroff: Titan Of Finance & Free Ent

Ardeshir Darabshaw Shroff (1899-1965), eminent industrialist, banker and economist, is considered one of the architects of free India’s industrial development and modernization. Among the earliest exponents of free enterprise in India, Shroff, once called a ‘Congress economist’, represented the country as a non-official delegate at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference and was an author of the Bombay Plan, prepared by eight leading industrialists in 1944 as a blueprint for India’s post-war economy. Later, in the fifties, as founder-director of the Investment Corporation of India, Chairman of Bank of India and the New India Assurance Company, and director of Tatas and many other leading companies, he became a powerful spokesman for private industry in an increasingly government regulated economy. His steadfast adherence to a vision of free enterprise in India has been vindicated thirty-five years later by the liberalization policies pursued in the nineties.

This authorized biography by Sucheta Dalal draws upon the personal papers of A.D. Shroff, the Tata Central Archives, the papers and libraries of the Bank of India, HDFC, and several other institutions with which he was associated. Based on these sources and interviews with industrialists, Shroff’s colleagues, family members and close friends, Dalal has presented a compelling portrait of Shroff whom J.R.D. Tata once described as a man with ‘an extremely powerful mind and moral courage’. As a true patriot, Shroff was a trenchant critic of official policies, like the nationalization of insurance, which he felt were contrary to the nation’s interests. His lone battle for free enterprise from the platform of the newly founded Forum of Free Enterprise in 1956, despite resistance from some quarters of private industry and great opposition from the governmental quarters, is seen as a measure of his fearless and independent nature. While tracking Shroff’s phenomenal professional career, the author also brings out many facets of his forceful personality: his determination, his zest for life, and his caustic wit.

Informed and objective, this account is a warm and fitting tribute to a visionary and an exceptional Indian in his birth centenary year.

‘‘ ‘His courage, his strength of mind, his passion for his countrymen, particularly for those who, like him, had roots in humble places, stirred admiration even among those who often could not share his opinions.’ —George Woods, President of World Bank