New Delhi, Jan. 3 -- When Sir Shri Ram, one of early 20th-century India's most forward-looking industrialists, set up the Commercial Education Trust in 1920, the country was still under colonial rule, its economy an appendage to Great Britain's, its ambitions restrained by the need to serve the empire.
Shri Ram had the ability to dream of a quietly radical institution that would treat commerce not as a subsidiary skill, but as a national necessity, a discipline capable of producing economic self-reliance.
This was the period when India's newly emergent leadership was keen to foster economic nationalism and produce a class of entrepreneurs who would set up the new "temples of modern India" - factories, mines, research institutes - which wo...