Sir Cyril Radcliffe hadn’t even begun sharpening his scalpel for the division of the subcontinent when a group of industrialists and technocrats met in Bombay. The year was 1944, the host was J R D Tata, 40. Among the guests were G D Birla, Kasturbhai Lalbhai, Sir Purshotamdas Thakurdas, Sir Shri Ram, Sir Ardeshir Dalal, A D Shroff and Dr John Matthai. It was, obviously, no ordinary gathering. Nor was their one-point agenda: a plan for a to-be independent country’s economic development.

Their brainchild was a Rs 10,000-crore, two-part, 90-page economic plan that came to be known as the Bombay Plan. At the back of their minds was a seminal book published 10 years previously by India’s most celebrated civil engineer and Dewan of the Mysore state, Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya. His Planned Economy highlighted the need for organising villages into effective economic units. His favourite one-liner: Industrialise or perish.

Four years after Visvesvaraya’s thesis, in 1938, Jawaharlal Nehru set up the National Planning Committee. Its reports on health, sanitation, food etc began to come in by 1940. The current mood also embraced the Soviet model, with its focus on heavy engineering. For JRD and his team, the task was cut out. ‘‘Planning without tears is almost an impossibility,’’ the Bombay Plan acknowledged. That said, its authors presented ‘‘the objectives to be kept in mind in economic planning in India... and the demands which planning is likely to make on the country’s resources’’.

Drafted by Matthai, the memo — a copy of which is available at the Tata Central Archives in Pune — has one predominant objective: how to double the per capita income (Rs 65 in 1931) in 15 years, providing for an increase in population of 5 million per annum. To achieve the target, the group proposed that net output of agriculture be doubled and that of industry be increased five times.

The Bombay Planners took as a baseline a minimum standard of living and quantified needs, estimating that an adult person required 2,800 calories a day, 30 yards of clothing and 100 sq feet of space. Then they went on to calculate the costs, the source of the funds and the industries the government needed to develop. With life expectancy an abysmal 26 years — and just one doctor available for every 9,000 people and one nurse every 86,000 people — the plan also outlined a minimum health standard.

‘‘The aggregate amount of income required to meet the barest requirements of human life is Rs 2,900 crore,’’ wrote Matthai. This figure included the cost of food (Rs 2,100 crore), clothing (Rs 260 crore), recurring expenditures on housing (Rs 260 crore), health and medicine (Rs 190 crore) and primary education (Rs 90 crore). The Plan provided sector-wise break-ups, estimating a total expenditure of Rs 10,000 crore. Industry accounted for Rs 4,480 crore, farming Rs 1,240 crore, communications Rs 940 crore, education Rs 490 crore, health Rs 450 crore, housing Rs 2,200 crore and miscellanea, Rs 200 crore.

After listing the expenses, the planners considered the sources of income. ‘‘The sources of external and internal finance which would be available to us are the hoarded wealth of the country, mainly gold (Rs 300 crore); our short-term loans to the UK, like sterling securities held by the RBI (Rs 1,000 crore); our favourable balance of trade (Rs 600 crore); foreign borrowing (Rs 700 crore); savings of the people (Rs 4,000 crore) and new money (Rs 3,400 crore) created against ad hoc securities.’’