AD Gorwala

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.

About

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. It is maintained by Arudra Burra (burra@iitd.ac.in), Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi.

As of now, the site hosts

• Opinion archive

  • A complete index of all the 24 volumes of Opinion, from 1960-1983
  • An index of scanned copies of Opinion (page opens in a new window).

• Articles and books

  • A compilation of books by Gorwala
  • A list of articles about Gorwala

Acknowledgements

The material on this website has been collected and put together over the years by the painstaking efforts of many research assistants: Adarsh Priyadarshi, Akash Dabaniya, Bani Bedi, Devanshi Sarin, Hardik, Sidharth Goel, Sonali Chugh and Vipul.