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Ashok Mitra has had a fabulous academic career, including a brilliant Ph.D. under Jan Tinbergen, and he has held important offices in the economic administration of India; he was Chairman of the Agricultural Prices Commission and Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India. He has taught in some of the premier institutions in India; and academic work took him to many places of higher learning all over the world. But throughout these years, his deep commitment to the cause of the people had found constant expression in overt and covert political action and in a stream of stimulating writing, both learned and popular, in English as well as Bangla. The long stint as Minister of Finance in the Left Front Government of West Bengal from 1977 onwards was, in fact, a culmination and a beginning for a man of enormous intellectual and political energy. He was also a Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha) for a time. His involvement in Leftist politics is still as active as ever and his writing has continued, as this book demonstrates. Dr. Mitra and his wife Gauri live in Kolkata.

Prabhat Patnaik, till recently Professor of Economics at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, is currently Vice-Chairman of the State Planning Board, Government of Kerala. He is the author of Time, Inflation and Growth (1988), Economics and Egalitarianism (1991), Whatever Happened to Imperialism and other essays (1995), Accumulation and Stability under Capitalism (1997), The Retreat to Unfreedom (2003) and The Value of Money (2008). He is the editor of the journal Social Scientist.