This article offers an explanation for disparities in the speed and level of political opposition to reform of the financial services sector in India. Focusing on the disparity of outcomes in reform of the insurance and the banking sector, the author suggests why some barriers to entry were present in India during the reform process. The author extends this argument to explain differing levels of political opposition to reform in the banking and insurance sectors. To provide empirical support for this theoretical construct, the author uses measures of market segmentation and market concentration to show how specific forms of state ownership helped promote divergent types of political opposition that built in India during the decision-making stage of reform and during the implementation of second-generation reforms. The experience of financial services reform in India offers important lessons for the new institutional economics literature on early transition elsewhere.

In a recent essay on “Some Mid-Ch'ing Views of the Monarchy,” Harold Kahn announced that he was moving past “the one-dimensional, simple cliché” and “the two-dimensional, complex stereotype” to add a third dimension so that he could show Ch'ien-lung as “a composite figure made up of several images.” Talk of three dimensions immediately prompts any healthy layman to try to add a fourth: to the three spatial dimensions which are historiographical, perhaps we can add a fourth dimension of time which is more positively historical.

Literary prose is a late developer in the history of any language and in Marathi, as for most other Indian languages, it does not appear in any significant quantity until the middle of the nineteenth century when the influence of English was beginning to transform a hitherto almost exclusively verse tradition. Before this the use of prose is limited to commentaries, to a few hagiographical works of the Mahānubhāv sect written in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, to historical narratives from the time of Maratha independence and to private and diplomatic correspondence of the same period. Of course, there must always have been a flourishing popular oral literature of fables and ghost stories, adaptations of episodes from the Puranas and the Epics, but these were never written down. Even among the well known Sanskrit story collections, only the Pancatantra is found in an early prose version in Marathi.

Every educational system, whether extant or planned, is an inseparable part of the social structure of the country in which it is, or it is to be, applied. Education is dependent much more than is generally realized upon prevalent political, economic and cultural trends and in turn, reflects these trends. This means that while it is possible to describe an educational system as an isolated cultural phase, it is not possible to understand it properly apart from the total social context. It must be seen and evaluated as a part of a whole.

Whenever the writer has asked anyone within the Soviet Union as to the functions of geography, the answer has invariably been “to develop the productive resources of the state.” Geography has proceeded along the lines of Marxian theory with especial emphasis on economic problems. Thus dozens of geographers are employed in the planning commissions of the U.S.S.R. and the constituent republics. Not only should these plans be in harmony with the natural environment, they are also the geographer's instrument for periodically changing this environment. Elsewhere the emphasis is equally on the political-economic side, with especial interest in people and their welfare, working conditions, and past relations to economic feudalism and imperialism. Those aspects of geography which deal with mere description, or with fields such as geomorphology or human ecology, are regarded as intellectual luxuries which must be postponed until some future date.