The Enigma of Kerala

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The combination of a stagnant economy and a strong commitment to providing health and education have left the state with large budget deficits. Development expert Joseph Collins, for all his praise of progress, calls it a 'bloated social welfare state without the economy to support it,' a place that has developed a 'populist welfare culture, where all the parties are into promising more goodies, which means more deficits. The mentality that things don't have to be funded, that's strong in Kerala--in the midst of the fiscal crisis that was going on while I was there, some of the parties were demanding that the agricultural pension be doubled.'

But the left seems to be waking up to the problems. Professor Thomas Isaac--described to me as a '24-karat Marxist' and as a wheel in the Communist Party--said, 'Our main effort has been to redistribute, not to manage, the economy. But because we on the left have real power, we need to have an active interest in that management--to formulate a new policy toward production.' Instead of building huge factories, or lowering wages to grab jobs from elsewhere, or collectivizing farmers, the left has embarked on a series of 'new democratic initiatives' that come as close as anything on the planet to actually incarnating 'sustainable development,' that buzzword beloved of environmentalists. The left has proposed, and on a small scale has begun, the People's Resource Mapping Program, an attempt to move beyond word literacy to 'land literacy.' Residents of local villages have begun assembling detailed maps of their area, showing topography, soil type, depth to the water table, and depth to bedrock. Information in hand, local people could sit down and see, for instance, where planting a grove of trees would prevent erosion.

And the mapmakers think about local human problems, too. In one village, for instance, residents were spending scarce cash during the dry season to buy vegetables imported from elsewhere in India. Paddy owners were asked to lease their land free of charge between rice crops for market gardens, which were sited by referring to the maps of soil types and the water table. Twenty-five hundred otherwise unemployed youth tended the gardens, and the vegetables were sold at the local market for less than the cost of the imports. This is the direct opposite of a global market. It is exquisitely local--it demands democracy, literacy, participation, cooperation. The new vegetables represent 'economic growth' of a sort that does much good and no harm. The number of rupees consumed, and hence the liters of oil spent packaging and shipping and advertising, go down, not up.

With high levels of education and ingrained commitment to fairness, such novel strategies might well solve Kerala's economic woes, especially since a stabilized population means it doesn't need to sprint simply to stay in place. One can imagine, easily, a state that manages to put more of its people to work for livable if low wages. They would manufacture items that they need, grow their own food, and participate in the world economy in a modest way, exporting workers and some high-value foods like spices, and attracting some tourists. 'Instead of urbanization, ruralization,' says K. Vishwanathan, a longtime Gandhian activist who runs an orphanage and job-training center where I spent several days. At his cooperative, near the silkworm pods used to produce high-quality fabric, women learn to repair small motors and transistor radios--to make things last, to build a small-scale economy of permanence. 'We don't need to become commercial agents, to always be buying and selling this and that,' says Vishwanathan. He talks on into the evening, spinning a future at once humble and exceedingly pleasant, much like the airy, tree-shaded community he has built on once-abandoned land--a future as close to the one envisioned by E. F. Schumacher or Thomas Jefferson or Gandhi as is currently imaginable. 'What is the good life?' asks Vishwanathan. 'The good life is to be a good neighbor, to consider your neighbor as yourself.'

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