INTRODUCTION 3 from the plan for seedlings and fertilisers. The length of roads constructed under the Campaign adds up to 7,947 kins." Apart from these physical achievements, the PPC has involved a series of institutional innovations. These include the local-level institutions like Gram Sabhas, beneficiary committees and neighbourhood groups, and the state-level institutions like the Ombudsman and the Information Kerala Mission. Gram Sabha, in the context of Kerala village panchayats being demographically too big, is organised at the ward-level. The dynamics of the PPC itself made it imperative to have a unit even below the Gram Sabha. Hence, ayalkoottams, collections of families in a neighbourhood, were organised to conduct various activities of PPC. DECENTRALISATION AS A MEANS OF DEFENCE AND RESISTANCE The decentralisation process which in its wake constituted effective institutions works as a defensive mechanism to safeguard the people from the effects of neo-liberal reforms. This was discussed in the context of concerns regarding the stagnation of productive forces in Kerala economy. This was an important consideration behind the undertaking of PPC. The crisis of productive forces was, however, deepened further by the time PPC came into being as a result of the neo-liberal reforms underway at the national-level. The economic reforms not only forced a decline in the existing productive capacity of the state but also threatened the systems of public provisioning of food, education and health care that Kerala was well known for. The paper by Prabhat Patnaik conceptualises this context. The paper by C. P. Chandrasekhar puts decentralised planning in the perspective of conventional ideas of planning and poses it as an attempt towards strengthening public initiative for economic development and planning. Patnaik in his paper distinguishes between what he calls the "firm-level decentralisation" from the "government-level decentralisation" and argues that the two are not only different but also contradictory to each other. Firm-level decentralisation, seeks to build an economic regime based on decentralisation of economic decision-making. It is taken to the micro-level production units, on the basis of a notion that in a regime of free markets firm-level rationality can bring about a socially rational outcome. In this sense, the firm-level decentralisation aims to dismantle the process of planning. Government-level decentralisation of the kind being attempted in Kerala, on the other hand, seeks to strengthen the process of planning by reforming its modus operandi. Obviously then, government-level