2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST U N P government of Jayawardene in Sri Lanka. "Liberalisation" is advocated in World Bank literature as paving the way for export-led growth. But in Sri Lanka, while the export achievements of the manufacturing sector h^ve been quite unremarkable, the plantation sector, traditionally the main exchange, earner, has entered into a protracted crisis of stagnant output, meagre investment and stagnant labour productivity, which, in the context of some rise in wages from the earlier appallingly low level in this sector, has meant declining ^profit-margins. And as far as the conventional agricultural sector is concerned, its use as an export base is limited-m/fr fdw by the constraint placed upon agricultural expansion by this very fact of a vast mass of pauperised peasantry. In arguing that "liberalisation*f a la World Bank offers little prospects of a vigorous capitalist development in Sri Lanka, the author gives a detailed picture of the contemporary agrarian scene there, which should be of interest XQ Indian readers. The ^rticjioby ^laoahwdu Chattopadhyay and Ruraa Bhattachacyyia utilises data collected in the course of a field survey in North Bei)jpl to test the proposition advanced by several authors about the interliakage between the land, latiour and credit markets* This proposition asswts s that the landlord faces bis tenants/labourers in several guises, as landlord/ employer, as usurer and so on, i e, across several differed markets^ «o that looking at any tingle market in isolation can be misleading; the dynamics (oj the lack of it) of the rural structure can be explored only by looking at the set of "interlinked markets" (a somewhat i3aisloa4in^ formulation tbis» since the phenomenon it refers to is really the coexistence of diverse and interrelated modes of exploitation by the s^me exploiting agency). The field study however finds that the landowner rarely extends credit to his labourers, and only selectively to his tenants; in general ^ie< does "not act ^s a usurer in this particular region. The authors conclude that it is not interlinked markets which characterises this region, but selective credit links with individual tenants. The article provides interesting information about a particular region, whieh should be jkept in mind in building up macro conceptions of the agrarian ^co^OQiy. Finally, the article by Satya Deva, apart from its gewral disoussion of agrarian change in India, and especially in Punjab and .Haryana, draws pointed attention to World Bank involvement in agriculture in this i-egion. We also publish a report on a seminar on the power sector which was held recently in Kerala. The seminar, one of whose notable features was the participation of workers from the power sector, covered a wide range of issues and discussed fairly comprehensively the maladies which afflict this vital sector. We hope the readers would find the brief summaries of some of the papers contained in the report useful aad informative.