ABSTRACT
The Kerala model of development is acknowledged to have produced the most rapid decline in poverty anywhere in India between the 1950s and the 1980s, resulting in significantly higher standards of living for most Malayalees (Heller 2005: 82).1 Redistributive government interventions spurred by the ‘public action’ of politically informed citizens are one of the major foundations of the model (Parayil 2000: 7) but in this, the Communist party has in turn played a crucial role – as well as its regular exclusion from power by its rival, the Congress party, resulting in a competition to establish programmes to improve people’s living conditions (Jeffrey 1992: 144; Heller 2005: 80ff). In Kerala’s post-liberalization period, starting in 1991, however, the tensions inherent in an alternative model of development, which forsakes capitalist accumulation and global competitiveness in favour of the redistribution of wealth through land reforms and the provision of general social security, have become ever more pronounced. The lack of industrialization and mechanization, high unemployment rates, and fiscal deficit that Kerala faces in an increasingly liberalized market (Tharamangalam 2006: 9-15) has strengthened the hand of those calling for ‘investment-friendly reforms’. That such gradual market-oriented reform in this ‘epitome of the welfare model of economy’ would in 2001 actually lead to starvation deaths, however, suggested that certain Keralites had perhaps been living in extremely precarious conditions all along (K S Singh 2001: 2). The deaths thereby prompted a profound reevaluation of the Kerala model.
