New Delhi, March 15 -- Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them. But the truly unfortunate are those who have greatness snatched away.

Take Purshottamdas Thakurdas, the Gujarati cotton trader and industrialist from Bombay. Had the Indian government followed the blueprint set out in the Bombay Plan of 1944, Thakurdas might have been remembered as the architect of an economic revolution.

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The 15-year investment strategy, outlined in January 1944 and initially meant for private circulation, had the potential to set India on a vastly different economic trajectory. Thakurdas, who condensed it into two pam...