In quick succession, between 1896 and 1906, Swami Vivekananda, Jamsetji Tata, Rabindranath Tagore and the engineer, Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, who founded the Institution of Engineers, returned from visits to Japan convinced that India should follow Japan’s path to modernize and industrialize. Visvesvaraya gave a clarion call to fellow Indians in 1898, “Industrialize or perish!” Three years later, in 1901, Dadabhai Naoroji estimated the ‘drain of wealth’ as a consequence of British rule and attributed colonial India’s backwardness to this fact in his book, Poverty and Un-British Rule in India
