58 SOCIAL SCIENTIST for a primary commodity exporting region (such as Kerala) within a larger economy. All these have the effect of reducing "planning" and "decentralised planning" to rather ad hoc affairs. "Decentralised planning", instead of being a more powerful mechanism (than "centralised planning") for augmenting the productive potential of a region, gets reduced to a mechanism for doling out funds, which may be available today but not tomorrow, for purposes that have little productive potential. In short, any planning, including "decentralised planning" must be based on an ability to predict the future with a reasonable degree of accuracy. It is only then that a series of sequentially linked decisions can be taken. The nee-liberal agenda undermines this ability. It makes a mockery of "planning". It encourages myopia, and hence the substitution of current consumption for asset-building. This is not to say that consumption should be pooh-poohed; but a distorted emphasis upon it must be. With a resource crunch facing them and with limited ability to undertake any meaningful medium or long term planning, panchayats may perforce begin to depend on external sources of project funding and to acquire the character of conduits for the distribution of external funds. In this role they would have to compete with NGOs of various descriptions; and in this role they could even become a lower level comprador agency, providing a base for foreign penetration. Such a vision of panchayats is the diametrical opposite of the vision enshrined in Kerala's concept of decentralised planning. The struggle between these two visions of the role of panchayats is an integral part of the ongoing struggle between two economic policy trajectories, one emphasising self-reliance and a broadening of the domestic mass market, and the other associated with the neo-liberal programme. V An agenda of economic decentralisation commands these days a broad spectrum of adherents, from Marxists to the World Bank. It is important however to remember that these adherents mean very different things when they talk of economic decentralisation. Neo-liberal writers, advocating a "rolling back of the State", see both "firm-level" decentralisation and "government-level" decentralisation, as mechanisms of such "rolling back", and hence as complementing one another. The purpose of my paper has been to argue that, instead of complementing, they actually contradict one another, that "firm-