2 SOCIAL SCIENTIST not privately-owned firms but collectives. (Maurice Dobb had shown great prescience in anticipating that "market socialism" as practised in erstwhile Yugoslavia would reproduce many of the ills of capitalism). Kerala's decentralization is not of this genre. It is aimed merely at obtaining a better "project-mix" within one particular component of the overall plan. It assumes that the plan is an addition of two separable components, and detaches one component which it entrusts to the lower-tier democratic bodies. Its aim therefore is better planning, not an end to planning. Even so however a doubt remains. Even though decentralization may appear perfectly compatible with planning to start with, one cannot ignore its immanent dialectics. What would prevent the local micro units from becoming self-serving entities? After all decentralization per se does not transcend local parochial consciousness. Might it not unleash a dialectics that ends up eventually subverting the concept of planning itself? C.P.Chandrashekhar's paper published in the current issue is a significant contribution to this debate. His conclusion that the success of democratic decentralization depends on the extent to which the local bodies transcend their local consciousness needs to be underscored. The importance of decentralization as a practical project is matched only by the significance of the theoretical challenge that is thrown up by the host of issues it raises. We hope that the two numbers of Social Scientist devoted to it have at least given a flavour of this theoretical challenge.