but all that good education also makes them ABLE to get jobs abroad
--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, bob_brigante <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/07/world/asia/07migrate.html
>
> "TRIVANDRUM, India This verdant swath of southern Indian coastline
> is a famously good place to be poor. People in the state of Kerala
> live nearly as long as Americans do, on a sliver of the income. They
> read at nearly the same rates.
>
> With leftist governments here in the state capital spending heavily
> on health and schools, a generation of scholars has celebrated
> the "Kerala model" as a humane alternative to market-driven
> development, a vision of social equality in an unequal capitalist
> world. But the Kerala model is under attack, one outbound worker at a
> time.
>
> Plagued by chronic unemployment, more Keralites than ever work
> abroad, often at sun-scorched jobs in the Persian Gulf that pay about
> $1 an hour and keep them from their families for years. The cash
> flowing home now helps support nearly one Kerala resident in three.
> That has some local scholars rewriting the Kerala story: far from
> escaping capitalism, they say, this celebrated corner of the
> developing world is painfully dependent on it.
>
> "Remittances from global capitalism are carrying the whole Kerala
> economy," said S. Irudaya Rajan, a demographer at the Center for
> Development Studies, a local research group. "There would have been
> starvation deaths in Kerala if there had been no migration. The
> Kerala model is good to read about but not practically applicable to
> any part of the world, including Kerala."
>
> more...
>
