62 SOCIAL SCIENTIST concessions to large industrial houses. The deepening economic crisis since the Fourth Plan has provided a convenient pretext for defeating the very purpose of the MRTP Act. None of the monopolies has been dissolved or broken. Monopolistic and restrictive trade practices have grown unabated under the very nose of Jthe Monopolies Commission! On the pretext of increasing production and exports, control over foreign capital is relaxed; clandestine expansion of capacity has been regularized^ full capacity utilization is e^courag'd ir-e^pecrve of the sphere of activity; licensing proceedures have been liberalized; fiscal inducements increased; marginal rates of personal^ taxation drastically scaled down; restriction on dividend defrozen while wages are put under deep-freeze and credit squeeze is relaxed in favour of production and export. Opening public sector enterprises to private participation is only a part of the policy of retreat from the egalitarian aspects of industrial policy. People's Capitalism! "People's capitalism" is by no means a new idea. The distribution of a microscopic proportion of ownership to workers was one of the devices adopted to blunt class consciousness and weaken the struggle against capitalist exploitation. Similar approaches were contained in the report of the Steering Group on Wages, Incomes and Prices Policies set up by T T Krishnamachari under the chairmanship of B K Madan. The report recommended reservation of a proportion of shares to be issued to "the better-off among workers and lower-salaried employees*' on special terms. This was meant to "widen the avenues of garnering resources for financing the establishment or expansion of at least some public sector enterprises" while at the same time affording channels of investment by the middle income groups (employee population) having an anti-inflationary potential. The basic idea behind this scheme was "profit-sharing with employees as part-owners of the enterprise".8 T A Pai has extended the concept of workers9 participation to that of the people in the neighbourhood of the undertakings and those interested in the end-product.4 There is nothing wrong in the idea of equity participation by the consumers or the people of the area where the industry is to be located. This should largely be the guideline for consumer-oriented small enterprises interested in mobilizing invcstible resources from different localites. As Pai has argued, "where the end product is more cognate to people at large there should be direct participation of the people". But, to use this argument to shed part of the equity holding of the public sector undertakings and rechristen them ^'National Sector" is intriguing. It is true that public, private and even foreign enterprises are physically located in the country. There is also some truth that most of the influential private units thrive on governmental support and public sector resources. To call them all "national" thereby blurring the distinction between public and private sectors and under this smokescreen to dilute the ownership of public sector enterprises, cut at the very root of the earlier approach to