PARADIGMS OF ECONOMIC DECENTRALISATION 59 level" decentralisation, and the neo-liberal agenda, in general, of which it is an integral part, emasculates decentralised planning, and makes "government-level" decentralisation vacuous. The panchayats too are a part of the machinery of the State. Strengthening panchayats through devolution of decision-making and resources is not a part of the "rolling back" of the State, but a means of enforcing greater accountability on the State, by entrusting a whole range of decisions, which directly affect the lives of the people, to those layers of the State where the people can organise effective supervision over it. The problems associated with dingiste development according to this perspective arise because of the class nature of the State, i.e. because the State is used by the dominant classes for their own aggrandisement. The degree of their success in doing so depends on the degree to which the State can evade public accountability for its actions. Since the "rolling back" of the State does nothing to diminish the power of the dominant classes, the latter would continue to aggrandise themselves, even through the so-called free markets in a neo-liberal economy; indeed their espousal of the latter arises precisely because they find themselves having reached the limits of accumulation through the path of dirigisme and now wish to carry on further aggrandisement in the company of metropolitan capital through the instrumentality of the so-called free market. It follows then that it is not the "rolling back" of the State but enforcing greater accountability on it, which constitutes the starting point of an alternative democratic strategy. And "decentralised planning" is a part of this alternative democratic strategy, whose success depends on the degree to which it progressively brings about a change in the balance of class forces. "Decentralised planning" then does not signify the end of the road. It must be the harbinger of a new social and economic order, neither merely reducible to the latter, nor standing apart from it.