SPECIALSKerala@70: The discontented Malayali
Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen famously described Indians as the Argumentative Indian. He used this expression positively to highlight India’s argumentative tradition as the cornerstone of the country’s social culture, intellectual pluralism, and democracy.
Taking a cue from Sen, Malayalis could be called the Discontented Malayali. Though Sen never described Malayalis as discontented, he argued that Keralam’s remarkable achievements in human development owed much to the constant democratic pressure its people -backed by a vibrant media- exerted on the authorities.
Both terms -argumentative and discontented- have negative connotations too. While argumentative literally describes a person who is quarrelsome or stubborn, being discontented can be negative when taken to the extreme. This author has often thought that even when Kerala repeatedly receives worldwide praise for its well-known achievements, many Malayalis themselves remain largely unimpressed. It is healthy to be self-critical, but when taken to its extreme, it often tends not just to correct its flaws -there are so many- but to rubbish Keralam’s universally acclaimed achievements altogether. It also dismisses the alternative path Kerala consciously adopted, which produced its indisputable gains. Though questioning a path and advocating another is a legitimate democratic right, can one belittle Kerala’s phenomenal gains of the past 70 years, which far outweigh its equally conspicuous failures?
While it is Kerala's 70th birthday, it is also the first for Keralam, following the Parliament's official restoration of its original Malayalam name. Since birthdays are occasions for stock-taking, this is an appropriate moment for such an exercise. This writer believes that Keralam’s most remarkable achievement of the past seven decades has been its securing the best of both worlds. Its fame as India’s leader in human development indices, even while it had remained economically backward, has long been celebrated as the unique Kerala Development Model. Equally remarkable is that Keralam retains this position even seven decades later, proving the doomsayers wrong. Yet, the second stage of Keralam's journey over the past seven decades saw the state achieving an unexpected feat. Keralam surged from the ranks of India’s poorest to be among the richest states from the late 1980s. The few who took note of this great leap forward described it as a miracle. This period also saw Keralam topping the country in rural Monthly Per Capita consumption Expenditure.
Over a decade ago, a heated debate erupted between globally renowned economists such as Amartya Sen, who championed the social investment-driven Kerala Model and Jagdish Bhagavati, a votary of the market-driven Gujarat Model. Today, Gujarat continues to lead Keralam in economic growth and manufacturing. Yet, in per capita income, Keralam (Rs 2.42 lakh) has almost caught up with Gujarat (Rs 2.46 lakh). At the same time, Keralam continues to struggle with high unemployment, low investment, and a fiscal crisis. Gujarat continues to lag in poverty eradication, infant mortality, sanitation, and other critical human development indicators. The jury is therefore still out on the Sen-Bhagavati debate.
Nevertheless, Keralam remains arguably the only Indian state that tops human development rankings while figuring among the ten richest states and posting higher growth rates than the national average. Certainly, other Southern states have grown faster, but hasn’t the world come to a consensus that genuine progress requires simultaneous economic growth and human development? Most importantly, Keralam’s social and economic transformation has been dramatic, given its starting point in 1956. It was then, among India’s four poorest states, saddled with the country’s highest population and unemployment rates and an extremely unequal feudal structure characterised by highly skewed asset ownership favouring the upper class and castes. Today, except for unemployment, the state has overcome the other hurdles. Hence Keralam consistently tops the rankings of almost every major organisation, be it global (the United Nations), national (NITI Aayog) or private (India Today magazine).
Keralam’s second major achievement has been advancing the British-ruled and backward Malabar region alongside the erstwhile Tiruvithamkoor and Kochi over these seven decades. The latter two had already topped the 565 Indian princely states in human development even before independence, thanks to their relatively benevolent royal governments, social reform movements, and foreign missionaries who worked to educate and improve the health of backward castes. The British-ruled Malabar, the third Malayalam-speaking region to form the new Kerala state in 1956, however, lagged on every indicator. Therefore, if the erstwhile royal governments deserve some credit for the progress of Tiruvithamkoor and Kochi, Malabar’s advancement owes almost entirely to Keralam’s post-1956 democratic polity.
Before turning to Keralam’s major failures- both chronic and new- it is worth identifying the factors behind its achievements. They include the land and educational reforms; sustained public investments in health and education; welfare pensions and poverty eradication programmes, including the public distribution system; the great Gulf migration and the resultant flow of remittances; the growth of the service sector and co-operative movement; the full literacy movement; massive decentralisation and financial devolution project under the People’s Planning Programme; women’s empowerment initiatives such as the Kudumbasree. Advances in tourism and Information Technology, including the setup of IT parks and startups, have challenged Keralam’s enduring image as a state hostile to business. This author would even include the KIIFBI scheme; had it been less opaque, it could have been an out-of-the-box attempt to help Keralam leapfrog its perennial scarcity of investment funds for capital expenditure, which kept it stuck in a low-growth orbit.
A frequently advanced argument is that Keralam’s economic surge in the second stage has nothing to do with the Kerala Model, which privileged human development over growth, but everything to do with Gulf migration and remittances. The argument is that the much-lauded model would have collapsed without the diaspora stepping in. Economists like K K George warned about the unsustainability of the state’s welfare system without sufficient economic growth in his noted book, The Limits to the Kerala Model. Gujarat Model advocates such as Bhagavati and Aravind Panagariya consistently argued that it was not the Kerala Model, but the petrodollars generated by a purely market system that brought Keralam’s prosperity.
Undoubtedly, the sweat, blood, and tears of Keralam's Malayali non-resident population lie beneath Keralam’s economic growth and the sustenance of its welfare system. Keralam’s annual remittances from its over 20 lakh NRKs amount to about one-fourth of its Net State Domestic Product and crossed Rs 2.17 lakh crore in 2025-26 despite ongoing military conflicts, partly aided by the rupee’s depreciation.
But arguing that the Gulf migration has nothing to do with Keralam’s human development is superficial. As Sen points out, Keralam’s economic take-off is direct evidence of his capability theory. He noted that early investments in education and healthcare created a highly skilled, healthy workforce that eventually stimulated and sustained rapid economic growth.
Now, let us look at where Kerala’s failed. Like its achievements, its failures too span multiple spheres: economic, human, social, and ecological. The country’s highest unemployment, perennial industrial and agrarian stagnation, low capital investment, landlessness and backwardness of the SC/ST communities and fisherfolk, inability to productively use the remittances or attract private investments, fiscal crisis, high trade deficit, low credit deposit ratio, and the mounting public debt have remained as the state’s chronic failures. So does the Kerala conundrum: poor government, prosperous people.
A newer and particularly disturbing challenge is the growing inequality, perhaps a Siamese twin of the recent economic growth. The state that has struggled for more than a century to establish egalitarianism now has the country’s highest Gini Coefficient, an income-inequality indicator.
The challenges on the human development front are largely recent and can be called second-generation problems. These include rising morbidity, including the spread of lifestyle diseases driven by economic prosperity; outbreaks of zoonotic epidemics partly caused by unplanned urbanisation; health and social issues among an ageing population whose life expectancy has increased through social investments; and rising out-of- pocket health and education expenditure.
Ecology is a field where Keralam at 70 faces enormous, even existential, challenges. Many of them result from lopsided or unplanned development and urbanisation. Even more dangerous than the disasters is the ecological illiteracy or cynicism of the political class and most of civil society, despite suffering all the devastation!
Women’s empowerment is another field where Keralam appears to have failed miserably, despite its remarkable success in conventional indicators. There has been a steady rise in atrocities against women and a collective exercise by society that kept them out of positions of authority. The proverbial glass ceiling is conspicuous even in political parties that swear by gender equality and progressiveness but are marked by their male-dominated leadership. Now the world has taken note of the enigma and paradox of Keralam’s women's empowerment and of the entrenched patriarchy and misogyny in the state’s society which have survived its political and social march forward.
However, where Keralam has made the most unmistakable backward journey over these seven decades is in caste and religious sectarianism. Though the state remains relatively insulated from the communal frenzy, witnessed in many parts of India but unimaginable a few decades ago in Keralam, it has come to afflict us too. No religion or caste is free from this trend. An increasingly exhibitionistic assertion of caste and religious identities and archaic rituals, abhorred since the Renaissance days, is spreading, often accompanied by contempt and hostility towards those outside one's own fold. While religious and caste violence remains comparatively less frequent, a non-violent form of hatred has gripped even sections that once proudly championed secularism and communal harmony. Gated communities, commonly associated with North India and designed to exclude particular communities, have also emerged in some Kerala cities.
Let me conclude with two examples of the enduring hold of caste and gender sectarianism in Keralam. First, the collective mobilisation that defeated young women's entry into the Sabarimala shrine as the 21st century entered its second decade. Second, the continuation of state-designed reservations for Malayali Brahmins in appointing priests at Sabarimala and Guruvayur, even as the historic declaration permitting entry to all Hindus approaches its centenary.