The memory and contribution of the economist and industrialist Ardeshir Darabshaw (AD) Shroff was recalled by journalist Shekhar Gupta in a column in Business Standard (BS) of December 12, 2024.
Gupta wrote: "Earlier this week, I had the honor of being invited to speak at the annual event of the Forum of Free Enterprise (FFE) in Bombay. The FFE was set up in July 1956 by Ardeshir Darabshaw (AD) Shroff as an intellectual and philosophical counter to Jawaharlal Nehru’s hard drive to the Left following the Congress Party’s Industrial Policy Resolution that April, which strangled Indian entrepreneurship for three-and-a-half decades, until P. V. Narasimha Rao broke the shackles in 1991.
A. D. Shroff: promoted economic freedom
"Shroff had been a member of the eight-member group of eminent Indians who drew up the Bombay Plan for India’s economy in 1944. He was also a non-official member at the first Bretton Woods gathering. He and the Bombay Plan lost the philosophical battle for the director of our post-Independence economy. The fighter and free spirit in him responded by building the FFE, an institution that would teach Indians the virtues of unfettered entrepreneurship and the evils of government controls...
"His institution fought Prime Minister Gandhi’s Socialist surge at her peak. Its supporters included Nani Palkhivala and Minoo Masani of the Swatantra Party. H. T. Parekh [former chairman and managing director of Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India (ICICI) and later founder of Housing Development Finance Corporation (HDFC)] became a backer too. The Emergency did not deter him…
"For those who might say it is risky to speak up given how powerful the establishment is, remember A. D. Shroff took on Nehru even on his central argument. Capitalism, Nehru said, was bad for democracy and political freedoms; Shroff said it was his kind of socialism that came loaded with that venom, and that economic and political freedoms must go hand in hand…
"The Forum does live on with eminent lawyer H. P. Ranina as president. But it’s no longer an intellectual powerhouse that will reach out to people young and old in all parts of the country to counter the relentless return of bad old ideas: Import substitution, government-mandated incentives (Postal Life Insurance, for example), retrospective taxation, protectionism, the return of the big state, goodbye to privatization…
"India’s economic reform has lost steam, is sliding backwards in some areas, and an institution like the Forum of Free Enterprise is missing just when it’s most needed — to protect our hard-won economic freedoms…” BS reported.