 By July 1969, the battle lines on the ruling Congress party were already drawn. On the one side stood Indira Gandhi, then Prime Minister under siege, now fighting a relentless struggle for political survival. Supporting her were the young Turks and radicals within the party. On the other side stood the old guard, represented in the cabinet by the Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Murarji Desai. Although the battle was ostensibly for the control of the Congress party, both sides took their postures on high moral grounds. Mrs. Gandhi and her supporters continuously reminded the Congress of the party's unfulfilled commitment to socialism. And among the many radical provisions which were promised but which remained unimplemented was the nationalization of banks. On the 16th of July 1969, Indira Gandhi took away the finance portfolio from Murarji Desai who promptly resigned from her cabinet. The feeling was that under the private ownership and private management, the banks were not doing enough to help agriculture, small industry, retail traders and other important but hitherto neglected sectors of the economy. That was the dominant motivation behind the idea to nationalize the major banks in the country. Critics maintain this economic move was propelled by political compulsions of the day and underlined a crucial dogma within which were retained seeds of populism, which for the next two decades would shape the nation's economic agenda. Published in December 1952, the first five-year plan of the Government of India stressed the role of the state as the prime mover of change. The focus of the plan was the rural sector and especially production of food grains. A primarily agrarian economy could not afford to ignore the agriculture sector. India, after all, was composed of over 600,000 villages and the land holding patterns in these rural areas was shaping the distribution of economic wealth in the country. For Nehru and his colleagues, land reforms was an essential input in this building of modern India and only through this could social justice and equitable distribution of wealth be achieved. Famines and hunger which were regular features in India are now more the exception than the rule and even when they do take place, they are contained and a country which once had to rely on the shiploads of PL480 food grains which arrived from the USA to feed its people thanks to the Green Revolution can now boast of surplus food grains. When a poor farmer produced five tons of wheat where they were only producing one ton, the whole technology spread like wildfire. A small government program became a mass movement and that was a great accomplishment. Otherwise the Green Revolution would have never come by any government program. It had to come, government was a trigger, a catalyst but it was the farmers who made it a movement. After independence, a handful of industrial dynasties controlled major shares of the private wealth but private wealth was viewed with a degree of suspicion. Industrial laws during these days were essentially devised to regulate and control private industries. The acts were designed so that economic power was not concentrated in the hands of big business alone but an array of controls, permits and licenses only helped generate an unhealthy nexus between the politician, the bureaucrat and the industrialist. Ironically, the same Congress which had for the last 50 years sworn by socialism and supported a command economy was rewriting a new economic agenda. With liberalisation, a new phase in the country's economic agenda has begun. The unshackling of the economy does not mean that the basic problems facing the country have all disappeared or that they can be wished away. Policy makers are aware that poverty and underdevelopment still have to be fought on a war footing.