Avadi is one of Chennai’s busiest industrial areas. The Heavy Vehicle Factory (HVF), the Ordnance Factory Board (ODF), which houses the locomotive factory, and the DRDO’s Combat Vehicles Research and Development Establishment (CVRDE) have given this populous western suburb of Chennai much national significance. But more than the defence establishments, it was at Avadi that India was set on a socialist economic path, nearly six decades ago.
The 70th session of the Indian National Congress was held in February 1955 under the presidency of U.N. Dhebar. The reception committee was headed by noted freedom fighter Ambujammal. She was the daughter of S. Srinivasa Iyengar, who presided over the 58th Congress session at Guwahati in 1928. Ambujammal writes in her book Naan Kanda Bharatham (The Bharat I witnessed) that a new Congress was born at the 1955 Avadi session, shunning its old image.
“I was hesitant to be the head of the reception committee for the conference,” she wrote. “But [Madras chief minister] K. Kamaraj convinced me, saying I was the competent person [to do it]. However, I was worried, as everything had to go on well and the conference had to be successful.” In another chapter, Ambujammal notes: “We met at Avadi and resolved to establish a socialistic pattern of society. At Avadi, the Congress also drew up a fresh economic policy.”
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Former Jammu and Kashmir prime minister Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad and the president of Yugoslavia Marshal Josip Broz Tito attended the 1955 convention as special invitees. As a result of the convention, prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru visited the Soviet Union in June that year and invited Soviet premier Nikolai Bulganin and the man who would succeed him, Nikita Krushchev, to India and asked them to develop heavy industries in the public sector. In August 1955, Khrushchev and Bulganin visited India.
As Ambujammal wrote, the conference and resolutions passed at the conference paved the way for economic and industrial growth in the decades to follow by the opening of public sector units, employment opportunities, a progressive rise in the standard of living, equality of opportunity, establishment of heavy industries and development of small-scale industries unlike ever before.
Avadi sowed the seeds to build India by way of Jawaharlal Nehru’s diplomacy, Ambujammal noted. Over the months that followed, there were deliberate attempts by the legislation to implement the resolutions passed in the Avadi conference. The deliberations by Nehru, Morarji Desai and other Congress veterans at the conference led to a consensus to facilitate the forward march of privatisation and liberalisation in India.
Later that year, on Gandhi Jayanti, the shell division of the Integral Coach Factory was inaugurated by Nehru in the presence of Railways minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, Kamaraj and MPs O.V. Alagesan and R. Venkataraman, who would become India’s eighth President.