A D Gorwala was a civil servant-turned-activist/journalist, who resigned from the prestigious Indian Civil Service in 1947, in protest at the Government of India's refusal to accept the need for food rationing restrictions during a food crisis. In the early 1950s he was very much part of the Nehruvian "nation-building" apparatus, having authored the famous Report on Public Administration (1951), and chaired the All-India Rural Credit Survey Report (1955) which recommended the formation of the State Bank of India.
By the late 1950s, Gorwala's political leanings took on an increasingly anti-establishment tone, which lead him to found the weekly journal Opinion in May 1960 (the first article in this publication was titled "The Cost of Shri Nehru."). Gorwala's run-ins with the establishment continued through the 70s, including a memorable series of conflicts with Mrs Indira Gandhi during the Emergency, as detailed for instance in the Shah Commission Enquiry Report.
This website is intended to be a place to catalogue Gorwala's life and work, as part of a larger attempt to catalogue histories of political dissent in independent India. As of now, it hosts a complete searchable index of all the 24 volumes of Opinion, from 1960-1983.
The site is maintained by Arudra Burra, associate professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi. Please contact him at
This is a searchable index of the complete archive of Opinion. Use the menu items below to browse through the volumes, publication year, and author lists. There is a search bar at the top of the page, which searches through authors and article titles.
Scanned PDFs of a few issues are available: to find them, toggle between "All Issues" and "Available Issues" on the right-most menu button below. (This feature is buggy just now; working on it).
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