SOCIAL SCIENTIST 2 current financial crisis of the States therefore is integrally linked to the IMF programme for India, which characteristically seeks to achieve "austerity" by imposing a drastic squeeze on the common people. The implications of import-liberalisation, another favourite IMF prescription, aredisscussedin Ashok Rao's article in the context of the power equipment industry. In virtually every capitalist country, power equipment is a protected industry. Moreover, in the current recession which has hit this industry very hard all over the capitalist world, so much so that, as Kitty Menon's note points out. Western European governments, including Margaret Thatcher's, are prepared to risk a major row with the U S on the question of Reagan's ban on equipment deliveries for the Siberian oil pipeline, the major producers are offering dump prices and easy credit in their desperate search for markets. This is precisely the time when the Indian government should be taking every conceivable step to protect and nurture our domestic power equipment industry against foreign onslaughts. On the contrary, it is starving the domestic industry of orders and is switching to the import of power equipment. All this notwithstanding the fact that BHEL has just entered into an agreement with Siemens to revamp its technology — to produce the very same power equipment that is now sought to be imported. Rao not only exposes the spuriousness of the technological arguments advanced in favour of bigger equipment that were meant to justify the Siemens collaboration in the first place, but also draws pointed attention to the utter absurdity of importing the very same equipment for the production of which the Siemens collaboration was entered into. Ajay Path's article on Hindustan Lever not only studies the impact of a multinational's operation on the host country's economy, but also brings out the importance of this particular offshoot in the global empire of Unilever. While Hindustan Lever accounts for no more than between 1 and 3 per cent of the Unilever empire's sales, capital employed, employment etc., it contributes a far higher proportion of total Unilever profits, siphoning out crores of rupees in precious foreign exchange every year. The three articles taken together expose the disastrous consequences for the economy of the new direction of the government's economic policy, i e, increasing administered prices, liberalising imports and opening the doors even wider to multinationals, a direction that was clearly discernible earlier but which has now been firmly imposed by the IMF diktat. Elsewhere in the issue Maitreyi Chaudhury criticises the so-called "modernisation theory" prevalent among sociologists, and C P Bhambri discusses the nature of India's foreign policy. The discussion between Anjan Ghosh and Pranab Kanti Basu, on the one hand, and Madhu Prasad, on the other, would, we hope, be the first of a series of such discussions in future numbers of the journal.