MAKING CAPITAL OUT OF CONSUMER GOODS

The following text was originally delivered as a speech by Abid Hussain at the 24th A. D. Shroff Memorial Lecture held in October 1989, originally published by the Forum of Free Enterprise. The author was an Indian economist, civil servant, and member of the Planning Commission, Government of India.

The text of this lecture is not currently held in the archive. The body previously published here was not Abid Hussain’s lecture at all: it was M. A. Rangoonwala’s address to the Forum’s Silver Jubilee on 12 January 1982, which appears in full and correctly attributed at FREE MARKET ECONOMY: Key to Economic Progress and Freedoms.

The substitution is inherited from the legacy site rather than introduced by the 2026 migration: captures of indianliberals.in going back to 2020 carry the same wrong text under this title. It was found on 27 July 2026 by a corpus-wide check for works whose prose duplicates another’s (scripts/dedupe/cross_contamination.py) and removed rather than left standing, because a musing is quotable down to the paragraph and this one would have let an agent attribute Rangoonwala’s words to Abid Hussain with a citation that resolves.

Recovering the real text needs the Forum of Free Enterprise booklet for the 24th A. D. Shroff Memorial Lecture, October 1989. The archive holds many lectures in that series but not this one.