Why hasn't equality in Kerala generated more economic growth? -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Response Jim C: As someone who has lived and taught in Kerala for several years and as someone who can read, write and speak Malayalam fluently, I take exception to this summary assertion or predicate that there is significant equality (presumably in distributions of wealth and income) prevailing in Kerala. I have seen Western academics, often leftists, go on a kind of "Potemkin Village" tour of Kerala and then come back to write about Kerala as some kind of beacon or shining example of equality and socialism standing out in the middle of the social formation of India. First of all, the inequalitites in Kerala are also glaring (less than in other parts of India but glaring nonetheless). Some of the more glaring manifestations of grossly unqual distributions of wealth and income are less manifest visibly because of more extensive practices of communal sharing and communal cohesion that prevail mostly in the rural areas leaving people to appear visibly better off than they really are. Next, there is the historic relationship with the central governments going back to Emergency Measures (and farther back than that even), the historic assaults on the Naxalites, regional tensions and jealousies etc that resulted in the south, particularly Kerala, parts of Madras, Tamil Nadu and Andra Predesh getting only the scraps from central government disbursements and being left isolated out of central government development programs. There is also the historic concentrations and roles of CPI and CPM in Kerala and alternating CPM versus Congress-I provincial governments that caused the central governments to leave Kerala and parts of the south out of any comprehensive development programs on the national level as forms of revenge when they brought CPM in as the state government. Further, although the inter-party and inter-faith forms of violence have not been as pronounced in Kerala as in the rest of India, class, skin color/tone, caste, and gender still play important roles in perpetuating social divisions that interfere with physical, human and social capital formation. Further, there is the issue of Indigenous Peoples such as the Dalits, in extensive numbers in Kerala and in the south who remain poor, marginalized, locked into Indigenous and "Scheduled Caste" colonies and exploited and whose talents are not brought into the development processes. I could go on with this but this should suffice for the moment. Jim C.
