The Bombay Plan is the name commonly given to a World War II-era set of Import substitution industrialization-based proposals for the development of the post-independence economy of India.
The plan, published in 1944/1945 by eight leading Indian industrialists, proposed state intervention in the economic development of the nation after independence from the United Kingdom (which took place in 1947).
The right foresaw it as a harbinger of a socialist society, and considered it a violation of the agreements of the United Nations "Bretton Woods Conference" (which Shroff had attended).
According to one analysis done in September 2004 (sixty years after the Bombay plan was prepared): "public sector corporations served as the personal fiefdoms of politicians and bureaucrats in power — the state thus became the "private" property of the privileged few.
Successive Congress governments (before the P. V. Narasimha Rao regime) set up an excessively bureaucratic economic system that stifled entrepreneurship and private initiative, on the one hand, and failed to provide primary education and basic health-care to the majority of Indians, on the other.