2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST perhaps which Brecht alluded to when he wrote: 'Hungry man, reach for the book!' G.G. Kotovsky has been a major scholar of the agrarian question in India, and to him goes the credit for having first tried to assess the quantitative significance of the capitalist sector in Indian agriculture. It is this work which formed the background to the debate on the mode of production in Indian agriculture that took place among Marxist scholars and academics in the seventies (an even earlier debate had taken place within the political movement). In his article in the current number Kotovsky returns to this same theme. He makes the important point that labour hire which produces only consumer value should not qualify the hiring farm as capitalist, and, on this basis, estimates that capitalist holdings constitute 8-12 per cent of all holdings, and that 'entrepreneur-type holdings in transition to the capitalist type' constitute another 8-12 per cent. Hopefully, Kotovsky's effort to quantify the size of the capitalist sector would stimulate further research on this important subject. Saraswati Haider provides a critique of the National Policy for Women in India, noting in particular two inconsistencies. The first is the treatment of women as if they constitute yet another minority group, for whom certain special programmes have to be devised; implicit in this attitude is a tendency towards token gestures. The second is the palpable contradiction between the promise to incorporate women's perspective in designing and implementing macroeconomic policies and the promotion of the neo-liberal reforms whose deleterious effects on women are by now well-known from experience all over the world. Finally we publish Aclitya Nigam's rejoinder to Aunindyo Chakravarty's critique of his earlier article on 'Marxism and Power'.