THE PRESS-Different Threats

and quite often not even the most efficient, allocator of resources among alternative purposes. But for that reason the task of apportioning resources among different uses and different groups of beneficiaries does not cease to exist and those in the government who claim to speak for the poor cannot evade facing the question whether the really poor would not be enormously benefited if large sums were to be saved out of what has been doled out year after year by the central and state governments in the name of agricultural subsidies and were to be made a vail able to be spent instead, to mention just one of so many possibilities, on a programme of compulsory primary education in the rural areas. This may not be what the World Bank and the IMF have in mind when they ask for the withdrawal of subsidies, but surely there can be no harm if the communist members of the ruling United Front, those in the government and those outside, turn their thoughts to such matters once in a while.