10 SOCIAL SCIENTIST differential prices to different sections of customers should be closely examined. It would however be unrealistic to assume that subsidies of all species could be straightaway eliminated. What should be the specific target of attack are the mindless subsidies—or those 'mindfuP ones whose purpose is to help, on the sly, such categories or classes as want to take the State for a ride. In the final analysis, the issue of resource mobilisation is inextricably linked with that of resource devolution. It is not altogether uncommon these days that not even a quarter of the total resources raised in a particular State flows back to that State as public outlay in some form or other. It is of marginal help here to argue that this is as it should be, since resources are being diverted from the economically stronger States to the economically weaker ones, from those who can afford to spare to those who are in need of resources.Things, analysed data indicate, have not quite worked out that way : the weaker States have not been the major beneficiaries of resources transferred from the relatively better off States : it is the Centre which has gained the most from these transfers, along with a sprinkling of States which do not however belong to the bottom of the economic scale, but who, for various extra-economic reasons, have been showered with bounty by the Centre. The issue which has now emerged in a most vocal form concerns the relative gains and losses of an over-centralised economic system compared to one which permits a relatively wide measure of devolution. The draft of the Seventh Five Year Plan, it could thus be argued, marks a retrogression, since the relative allocation of the public sector outlay between the Centre and the State has receded to the region of 55:45 in favour of the Centre as against the equal allocation in the Sixth Plan. The nation has experimented with a centralised model of resource control and economic decision-making for the last three and a half decades. Whether this has succeeded in lifting the economy to an optimum path of growth, featured by balanced regional development and elimination of the more glaring social inequalities, is the central question. And the danger always remains of the system totally breaking down in case both resources and benefits maintain a unidirectional flow. To suggest that all such issues have already been referred to the Commission on Centre-State relations and that its recommendations should be awaited is not helpful either at this juncture. The Union government did not bother to consult the Commission before it took the unprecedented decision to block the recommendations of the" Eighth Finance Commission for 1984-85, thus depriving the States, once and for all, the use of resources of the order ofRs. 1,500 crores. It has continued to take a rigid view in the matter of the States' overdrafts from Reserve Bai^k of India, while turning a Nelson's eye on the overdrafts from commercial banks indulged in by some State governments politically aligned to it, running huge deficits on its own account with the nation's central bank and at the same time giving up major revenue sources. Unless these imbalances in attitudes and decisions are taken care of, the fiscal edifice would indeed continue to be in great peril.