Blueprint for Power

The Raj took a bold step in India last week. Viceroy Lord Wavell named hardheaded, hard-working Sir Ardeshir Dalal, 60, of Bombay's famed House of Tata, to a seat on his Executive Council and the job of postwar industrial planning. Britain had smiled on the ambitious Bombay 15-Year Plan, a proposal to spend $30,000,000,000 in modernizing backward India.

The Plan. This vast scheme is the brainchild of Bombay multimillionaire J.R.D. Tata (TIME, Sept. 14, 1942) and seven fellow industrialists and associates. Their goal: double India's per capita income, triple her national income. They want Indian industry to quintuple its output, Indian farms to double their produce. Improved housing, education, transportation, communication, health and sanitation figure in the scheme.

First would come the expansion of heavy industry (steel, etc.), then of textiles, glass, leather and paper goods, to bacco, oil for consumers. The Indian capitalists who sponsored the plan pointed to the U.S.S.R., recalled that the Russians had to do without the things people like to buy while getting a start in basic production.

For a start at financing the plan, Tata & friends would draw on the $3,000,000,000 credit India has built up in London during the war, would also lure home-wealth into investment (they estimated Indians' savings at $12,000,000,000).

The Play. The plan, economic in purpose, also had great political significance.

Until lately, many Indian industrialists contributed liberally to Mohandas Gandhi's Congress Party, banked on it for political backing. Now that the Party is in decline, they must bank on themselves and/or the British. When the Indian tycoons' man, Sir Ardeshir Dalal, joined the Viceroy's council, it looked as though India's industrialists and India's Raj were going to bank on each other. Tata & friends had said they still wanted a strong national government with power to act for India and Indians. Perhaps, through economic cooperation with the Raj, they could get what they wanted without the turmoil of India's recent past.

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