On the other hand.. yes, Kerala is very beautiful in many ways. I wish I was born there because it's nigh impossible to settle in permanently otherwise.
They have some of the highest debt in india. The government even went as far as to put empty home tax, which is highly uncommon in india.
Lack of industries and job opportunities people are moving out of the state. This is a a propaganda, probably by the state.you just need to do some simple search to validate my comments.
Yea that is a absolutely wrong. A state that had the highest literacy rate at independence will unsurprisingly remain at the higher end of developmental rankings..
In the 1970s Kerala was already comparable to Indian states from a human development and economic standpoint because of a strong shipbuilding and cooperative agricultural program (same with then undivided Punjab) [0] and by 1990 had developmental indicators comparable to Delhi NCR.
Instead, we should look at states that were historically more undeveloped than Kerala but are now within range of Kerala.
As such, a better rags to riches model to dig into is Tamil Nadu [1] or Haryana [2] - both were on the lower end of India's HDI rankings in 1990, and now outperform most states and lead India in GDP per Capita as well.
Himachal Pradesh [3] and Jammu Kashmir [4][5] are two others to also look at, as they are historically undeveloped agrarian Himalayan border states with laggard developmental indicators that used land reform, cooperative agribusiness, mass rural education drives, and specialized manufacturing (Pharma in Himachal, Food Processing in Jammu) to have high HDIs.
[0] - https://eacpm.gov.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/State-GDP-Wo...
[1] - https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-rep...
[2] - https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/archive/comment/birth-of-h...
[3] - https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-rep...
[4] - https://ras.org.in/index.php?Article=land_reform_in_kashmir
[5] - https://cup.columbia.edu/book/a-strategic-myth/9788194717560...
> most of the Haryana's growth has come from being in proximity of New Delhi
Not really.
Delhi NCR de-industrialized in the 1970s-80s due to militant labor unionism [2]
Furthermore, much of Haryana's population lives well outside of what became Delhi NCR, and urbanization only began in the 1980s with the development of SEZs in Manesar, Faridabad, and Gurgaon.
> Same for Tamil Nadu (56%).
Tamil Nadu shared similar developmental metrics to Haryana in the 1981 NHDR, neighbored a state in an active civil war that often leaked into the state (Sri Lanka / LTTE), and had severe caste fractures.
[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_states_and_un...
[1] - https://www.researchgate.net/figure/HUMAN-DEVELOPMENT-INDEX-...
But I do not think it's replicable in most other LDCs due to historical quirks.
Like, Malawi, Guinea, or Afghanistan can't use much of the "Kerala Model" to succeed, as India was unique in that it was subsidizing the UAE's economy with the "Gulf Rupee" [0] (maybe Cambodia/Laos thanks to Thailand, but it ain't a great reason why IYKYK)
[0] - https://ar.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%A8%D9%8A%D8%...
HP doesn't have a "Dehradun", which means local netas have an incentive to invest in their zilla instead of hoarding cash and real estate in a major hub. Thus, Himachal benefited from a Pharma and Food Processing industrial policy in the 1990s-2000s that industrialized the rural area around Baddi and Una, and a lot of other smaller food processing and light manufacturing industries across lower Himachal.
Also, Uttarakhand has too few MLAs for the size of population. UK has 70 MLAs but 10 million people, but HP has 68 MLAs with 6.5 million people. This means UK MLAs are much more divorced from local panchayats compared to in HP.
There is a good case study about this at Harvard Business School [0]
[0] - https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/Asian_Survey_550...
Trust me. You don't want that. Ussi najuwane nu khadi pata ni hege (Kangri but translate to your equivalent)
https://english.mathrubhumi.com/news/money/malayalis-make-in...
* No big invasions from outside India. North India constantly faced Invasion.
* Tropical weather which makes doing agriculture easy.
* Good rainfall and no need to worry about water. Many Indian states you need to worry about water accessibility.
* No shit given to anyone caste or religion for the most part except for things like marriage.
Unemployment is at 40%. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_in_Kerala
Kerala is in the grip of a surging drug crisis https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/india/kerala-is-in...
Kerala rooting on central govt to solve state's Rs 26,000 crore monthly expenditure crisis https://keralakaumudi.com/en/news/news.php?id=1498119&u=kera...
Speaking of the left, I remember being next to a protest circa 1990 against ... computers!
I'm sure there are valid other views than the one presented in the article, I'm not saying there aren't. But as someone who doesn't know much about the region, you aren't really giving me more information about it, or giving me any reasons to take your view more seriously than the one presented in the article.
Basically, Kerala exports a workforce because it can't produce or export anything else. At roughly a third of the GDP (in 2012 according to Wikipedia), it's a remittance based economy. Someone commented that remittances are a smaller part of the economy of late (and that might well be true), but in the last decade or so Kerala is also heavily in debt.
I don't have numbers for the last ten years, but if remittance has gone down, it is also neck deep in debt. I am in Kerala quite frequently, and can confirm that there are no industries there - except for tourism, and some IT which is relatively miniscule compared to neighbouring states.
Table 5.2, pg 51 of https://iimad.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/KMS-2023-Report...
"The state has one of the highest concentrations of startups". I laughed out loud at this one. Of all the half-truths peddled in that article, this was easily the most hilarious and egregious.
I will say however that I think it's unfair to call professor Roy a neoliberal. Being a neoliberal is merely the expectation for most economic "theorists", but his vocal apologetics for imperalism and colonialism is not.
> Indian Marxists viciously attacked the CEHI, arguing the imperial state's aim was to extract surplus from India, that it withheld the capacity to do good in famines, and deployed the capacity to cause harm at all other times.
> In this void, blog and trade-book writers moved in with a leftist-nationalist political agenda posing as economic history. Most of their claims can be dismissed by subjecting them to the 1980s test: Can economic change be read as an effect of the Empire? The answer remains: No.
This is indeed a very powerful purity test, "Do your claim go against my utterly ahistorical narrative? If not, then I can comfortably dismiss them without addressing them."
> That India's trade surplus meant Britain looted India is bad logic because the surplus did not mean theft but the purchase of services. “Millions of Indians died of policy-induced famines” (Hickel) is bad logic by assuming infinite state capacity was deliberately withheld.
This one is quite rich aswell, it's just blunt unapologetic imperalism denial. It's bad logic because the logic bothers me.
I mean it just goes on and that's just his most recent tweets.
What you really need is industry. Kerala on that note has a very low score. Many states have much bigger industry and thus work for the people in those states. Kerala is still a rural farming/ tourism state and the only reason it has any money is because they send people to do blue collar back-breaking work in UAE and get back remittances.
To be fair, this is an India wide problem. India creates far more engineers than it needs, hence they all leave to find jobs elsewhere. There is almost no high quality engineering jobs in India, if they exist they are a part of US based tech companies. All Indian companies are stuck 10+ years in the past. Among that Kerala is a particularly bad offender where it doesn’t have even the existing textile/ steel/ automotive industry that other states do.
