Over the past three decades the developing world has seen increasing devolution of political and economic power to local governments. Decentralization is considered an important element of participatory democracy and, along with privatization and deregulation, represents a substantial reduction...

This work is based on a programme of work in Palanpur from 1974, based primarily at the LSE, and uses two previous studies from the Agricultural Economics Research Centre of the University in Delhi from 1957/8 and 1962/3. There are now six surveys of the village, one for every decade since...