Professor B. R. Shenoy was India’s most prominent liberal economist in the years after Independence. He was a lone voice against the then-dominant Soviet model of economic planning and state-owned heavy industry. As a member of the Planning Commission, in his celebrated Note of Dissent to the Second Five Year Plan, he argued for employment-generating investment in agriculture and light industry. He advocated free enterprise, reliance on a market economy, and the sweeping away of what he called the “Permit-Licence Raj,” a phrase that subsequently gained wide public currency. An old freedom fighter, he was deeply patriotic and opposed to sectarian divisions. He foresaw that economic reforms could create a country that embodied the ERC Vision Statement.
Biographical Note on PROFESSOR B.R. SHENOY (1905-78)
Born on June 3, 1905, near Mangalore, Karnataka, Bellikoth Raghunath Shenoy was educated at Benares Hindu University, where he secured First Class First in the M.A. Economics examination in 1929, and later at the London School of Economics (LSE), where he obtained the BSc (Econ), the School's flagship degree of the period. He was subsequently awarded the MSc (Econ).
As a student, he actively participated in the freedom struggle and was jailed at Nagpur, where he came into close contact with, and under the immense influence of, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya. At LSE, he was inspired by the ideas of Professor Friedrich Hayek, who later won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. During this period, two of his papers, "An Equation for the Price Level of New Investment Goods" (1931) and "Interdependence of Price Levels" (1933), appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, establishing his reputation as a promising monetary economist. He was the first Indian economist to have a paper published in a leading international scholarly journal.
After returning to India, Professor B. R. Shenoy taught at Wadia College (Pune), Gujarat College (Ahmedabad), and the University of Ceylon. He was associated with various government bodies in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), including the Commission on Currency and the Department of Commerce. In 1942, he was appointed Principal of L. D. Arts College, Ahmedabad, and joined the Reserve Bank of India in 1945. During his tenure at the RBI, he served as the IMF's Far Eastern Representative (1948) and later as an Alternate Executive Director representing India at both the IMF and the World Bank (1951–53).
Professor B. R. Shenoy was fluent in Malayalam, Konkani, Hindi, Kannada, and English. His scholarly writings were in English, and several of his works were later translated into Gujarati, as well as into German and Italian.
In 1954, Professor B. R. Shenoy joined Gujarat University as the founding Director of its School of Social Sciences, a position he held until 1968. During this period, he emerged as one of India's leading critics of central economic planning and made substantial contributions to Indian economic policy debates. He is best remembered for his celebrated Note of Dissent to the Second Five Year Plan, in which he challenged the Mahalanobis strategy of central planning and advocated a market-oriented path to economic development. His Madras University Lectures, later published as Problems of Indian Economic Development, and his contributions to debates on PL480 food imports, deficit financing, inflation, and economic development were marked by technical competence, analytical rigour, and intellectual independence.
After leaving Gujarat University in 1968, he founded the Economic Research Centre in Delhi and tirelessly espoused the cause of liberalism in India until his passing on February 8, 1978.
Professor B. R. Shenoy served as President of the Indian Economic Association in 1957, was a Visiting Professor at his alma mater, the London School of Economics, in 1966, and was a member of the internationally prestigious Mont Pelerin Society, which counted several Nobel laureates among its members.
His publications include Ceylon Currency and Banking (1941), The Sterling Assets of the Reserve Bank of India (1953), Problems of Indian Economic Development (1956), and PL480 and India's Food Problem (1974). In addition, he authored numerous articles in leading Indian and international scholarly journals.
A collection of his writings, Planned Progress or Planned Chaos, edited by Professors Mahesh Bhatt and S. B. Mehta, was published in 1996.
Today, Professor B. R. Shenoy is widely regarded as one of India's foremost classical liberal economists. His ideas on markets, monetary stability, fiscal discipline, and limited government continue to influence scholars, policymakers, and students of Indian economic thought.
