About A. D. Gorwala
Astad Dinshaw Gorwala (1900–1989) was a Parsi civil servant, administrator, and later journalist. He joined the Indian Civil Service in 1924 and served in Sindh and in the Bombay secretariat, eventually becoming the province's Director of Civil Supplies, where he set up the wartime food rationing system that kept Bombay fed through the shortages of the Second World War — work for which he was appointed a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1944.
In 1947, months before independence, Gorwala resigned from the Civil Service in protest at the government's refusal to take food shortages seriously. He remained close to the Nehruvian administrative project through the early 1950s, authoring the influential 1951 Report on Public Administration and chairing the 1955 All-India Rural Credit Survey Report, whose recommendations led to the creation of the State Bank of India.
By the late 1950s his politics had turned firmly critical of the establishment, and in May 1960 he founded Opinion, a weekly review through which he wrote against corruption, administrative overreach, and the abuse of state power. His confrontations with Indira Gandhi's government sharpened during the Emergency (1975–77): when Opinion was ordered shut down, Gorwala managed to print one final issue condemning the regime — an episode later documented in the Shah Commission's enquiry into Emergency-era excesses.
Writings about Gorwala
- Ashok Mahadevan, "Astad Dinshah Gorwala, The Man Who Would Not Be Silent" (Reader's Digest, July 2019)
- Ramachandra Guha, "Kashmir, Then as Now" (The Hindu, November 2006)
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Selections from Say Not the Struggle: Essays in Honour of A. D. Gorwala (OUP, 1976) — a Festschrift edited by H. M. Patel and presented to Gorwala on his 75th birthday:
- H. M. Patel, Introduction [pdf]
- H. M. Patel, Gorwala's Justice [pdf]
- Gauri Deshpande, The Editor [pdf]