34 SOCIAL SCIENTIST can be viewed as directly revenue-augmenting. The systematic liberalisation of import restrictions since 1981 and the various detailed changes in this area fall under this category, as can be clearly seen from the increasing share of customs revenue in the new tax proposals in the successive badgets of the last few years. The so-called chageovcr from physical to fiscal controls is most obvious in this area. In fact, replacement of physical controls by fiscal levies can be theoretically viewed as allowing the private sector to buy the consent of the government to engage in socially less desired (or undesired) activities. It is possible to conceive of a scheme, as the government itself appears to have been doing, where the private sector pays increasingly higher prices for purchasing the government's permission for activities which are more and more undesirable along the social priority scale. As long as such prices leave a margin for the private sector to engage in these activities at a profit, tlhe result is both more revenue for the government and a more pronounced distortion of our production and trading activities away from the socially desired. Some of the policy changes adopted towards the non-resident Indians9 (NRI) investments and deposits and to foreign corporations are also related to the government's quest for revenue. We will argue below that the government's failure in the mobilisation of domestic resources has led it to look for foreign exchange resources as a partial substitute for rupees, and policy changes aimed at the NRPs and foreign corporations have been adopted more because they are resource-augmenting than because they are integral aspects of any maticulous strategy about our foreign trade and balance of payments structure in the long run. The second group of changes can be viewed as simply a relaxation of controls without even the exchequer gaining through it. Measures in this group do not seek to replace one set of controls by another, but just to abolish them. We will leave out the various concessions and subsidies granted to the different sections of industry and trade in recent years. Even though they have acquired enormous proportions in the annual budgets, they can be mostly explained by sectional lobbying with the government. What is more significant for our discussion is the gradual creation of an overall environment of permissiveness, through decontrol, for the entire private sector of industry and trade, which, we will argue below, betrays the emergence of a philosophy that for the survival and growth of our system a relatively unencumbered development of private capital and enterprise has to be increasingly relied upon. The measures under this group, examined below in more detail, include such diverse items as opening out to private sector of lines of production so far kept under government monopoly, routine re-endorsement of licensed capacity on the basis of actual production for even MRTP units, raising of the cut-off limits of GAS and allowing banks to grant sometimes upto 75 per cent