The city and the village have always existed as adversaries in our collective imagination. For state planners and sociologists, this mutually exclusive relationship is articulated as India versus Bharat. Power-brokers and nostalgia merchants have also fed on this logic of opposites. Colonial rule and the entry of western ideas of modernity only helped to reinforce this dichotomy. The pace of change in the political and economic structures always favoured a vision that saw urban India as a state independent of its rural hinterland.The city as a modern entity and the village as an area of darkness or vice versa has dominated social discourse since Independence. The Budget for 2005-06 could change the character of the debate. There appears to be an attempt on the part of Palaniappan Chidambaram to see the urban and the rural as part of the same dialectic. (Editorial).