Ardeshir Darabshaw Shroff (1899-1965), eminent industrialist, banker and economist, is considered one of the architects of free India's industrial development and modernization. Among the earliest exponents of free enterprise in India, Shroff, once called a ‘Congress economist', represented the country as a non-official delegate at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference and was an author of the Bombay Plan, prepared by eight leading industrialists in 1944 as a blueprint for India's post-war economy. Later, in the fifties, as founder-director of the Investment Corporation of India, Chairman of Bank of India and the New India Assurance Company, and director of Tatas and many other leading companies, he became a powerful spokesman for private industry in an increasingly government regulated economy. His steadfast adherence to a vision of free enterprise in India has been vindicated thirty-five years later by the liberalization policies pursued in the nineties.