BOOK REVIEW 65 the IMF is an unrelenting Shylock, with another it is not. Latin America, Africa, Asia or anywhere else in the Third World, from one borrower to another, the IMF has relentlessly implemented the same package which, as Chandra sums up, ''was devised by the IMF to rectify the structural imbalance in the external transactions of a large borrower from the Third World" but has proved inept, "if not self-defeating". Behind the veneer of technical conditionalities is hidden the desire of the IMF to trap the borrower into failing on one count or another, so that harsher terms could be imposed. "The basic objective is to impose on the latter a crude version of laissez faire policy from which only the transnational companies as well as the big domestic traders, capitalists and landowners can profit" (p 91-92). And who in India will profit from all this? Surely those very classes who, peddling what Bagchi calls a "retrograde ideology", are mortgaging the "whole future of the country" to imperialism. The vast mass of wage-earners, poor people and small producers have nothing to gain. Is there anything left for us to do? Perhaps one can still take courage from Asok Mitra and give a call to the "people and the Parliament to reverse the process" (p 11). SANJAYA BAKU* 1 Cheryl Payer, The Debt Trap: The IMF and the Third World, Penguin. 1974, Monthly Rev:ew Press, 1975. 2 "Ministry without Portfolio: IMF Survey", The Economist, 26 September-2 October 1980. 3 C P Chandrasekhar, "Export Growth for 'Structural Adjustemenf: An Est mate" (mimeo), 1981. * Department of Economics, University of Hyderabad.