2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST particular, and warns that an authentic history of the people cannot emerge if we spurn the study of the history of the elite as well; a study of the elite is not necessarily elitist. In this centenary year of Marx's death, we propose to carry in Social Scientist a number of articles dealing with various aspects of Marx's analysis. . Apart from the Marx Centenary number published last month, we shall try and have at least one article every month devoted to a discussion of Marx's analysis in our coming numbers. Kalyan Das Gupta's piece on Marx and Chernyshevskii is a part of this project. While the article introduces to Indian readers the writings of Chernyshevskii, the great Russian revolutionary of the nineteenth century whom both Marx and Lenin held in the highest regard, it is bound to arouse controversy for perhaps overstating the impact of Chernyshevskii on Marx's views, and, by implication, on the Marxist tradition, particularly insofar as it does not discuss the long and sustained controversy that Russian Marxists, notably Lenin, waged against the Narodnik position regarding the bypassing of capitalism through a direct transition from the mir to socialism. The link between Marx's concept of the "real peoples' revolution" which pre-dates his specific concern with Russia, and Lenin's concept of the ^revolutionary democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants", a link always emphasised by Lenin, has to be brought into any discussion of the evolution of the Marxist view on transition to socialism in a backward society. But there is no gainsaying the importance of the problematic of the article, and we hope it would stimulate a lively debate in the pages of this journal. Abanti Kundu's p^aper draws attention to the contrast between the urbanisation experience in the West in the wake of industrial revolution, which produced not only a complementary town-country relationship but also a hierarchical pattern of towns, and that in the Third World in general, and in colonial India in particular, which created only a few enclaves in the interests of capital from the metropolitan countries. Post-independence development has not in ary way broken down tMs enclave nature of the urban centres notwithstanding the vast amounts of public investment that have been poured into particular urban agglomerations to develop large-scale industrial projects. In the Notes section, while M JK Thavarj discusses the recent Uaion budget, Romi Khosia provides an expose of the callousness as well as comicality of government policy towards rural housing. And finally, the communication on Gopa Joshi's article on forest policy published in an earlier number raises certain important questions of method, on which we invite further comments from interested readers.