INDIAN ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT 35 and mixed economy". Both these goals implied a drastically reduced, if not altogether non-existent, dependence on foreign capital and foreign technology. What is important to emphasise though is the fact that this broad strategy of economic development was the outcome of a national consensus which enveloped a wide variety of groups/classes. The National Planning Committee, which constituted the womb in which the national consensus took initial form, consisted of a wide variety of people with varying and, albeit, conflicting ideological predilections. Nehru described the composition thus: Among the members are well-known industrialists, financiers, economists, professors and scientists, as well as representatives of the Trade Union Congress and of the Village Industries Association. The non-Congress Provincial Governments (Bengal, Punjab and Sind) as well as some of the major states (Hyderabad, Mysore, Travancore, Bhopal) cooperated with this Committee. ... Hard-headed Big Business was there, as well as people who are called idealistic and doctrinaire, Socialists and near-communists.1 It was this assortment of people who framed the "national consensus", and the one common denominator which characterised all of them was the fact that they were nationalists in varying degrees. It was their undercurrent of nationalism and their commitment, again for varying reasons, to rapid economic development that allowed them to arrive at the national consensus. It is not without significance that in 1946 a group of big businessmen should have drafted a perspective plan for India which largely conformed to the philosophy of the "national consensus", to repeat, "self-reliance and mixed economy". In 1946 a group of prominent bussinessmen including JRD Tata, A D Shroff, G D Biria, Ardeshir Dalal, and so on drafted a "long-term plan" which came to be popularly known as the "Bombay Plan" which, among other things, emphasised the role of the public sector in the economy, the need to curb foreign capital, the need on the part of the central government to invest a vast amount of capital so that per capita income, employment, national income, and such other indicators of development could be visibly improved within a certain time horizon. The Bombay Plan had pragmatism writ large on it. There was no indication whatsoever in it of what we encounter so often today, namely, a distaste for the public sector or a downgrading of indigenous technology; nor was there the contemporary penchant for foreign capital and technology. Import we must, but only if necessary. This constituted the hall-mark of that plan. And it is interesting to note that this was more or less true of the Industrial Policy Resolution (IPR), 1948. The IPR, 1948, was the first important policy statement of the newly constituted government and it reiterated once again the commitment of the