[Marxism] Kerala model questioned

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, September 7, 2007
Border Crossings
Jobs Abroad Support ‘Model’ State in India
By JASON DePARLE

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.”

Local lessons would matter less if this were a section of Mexico or 
Manila — places known for the hardships that make migrants flee. But 
Kerala’s standing as the other way — the benevolent path to development, 
a retort to globalization — makes the travails of its 1.8 million 
globalizing migrants especially resonant. The debate about Kerala is a 
debate about future strategies across the impoverished world.

Laly Mohan’s life offers the kind of case study common here. Having 
risen from a poor family to finish two years of college, her husband, 
Ramakrishnan, 39, saw few job prospects and left for the gulf 15 years 
ago. As a driver in Qatar, he now earns $375 a month, about five times 
the local wage, and sees his family once a year, on a three-week visit.

Mr. Mohan’s earnings have brought the family the accouterments of 
middle-class life: a renovated kitchen, a new motorscooter and a 
parochial school education for two daughters, Blessy, 10, and Elsa, 6. 
But despite her husband’s daily calls, Ms. Mohan said, “I feel very 
alone,” and the girls plead for their father’s return. “They want Papa 
and they also want money,” she said. “They cannot have both.”

“So many educated people are here, but we have no jobs,” Ms. Mohan 
added. “That is a big problem, a really big problem.”

To its admirers, the state’s struggles are those endemic to the 
developing world, while its achievements are unique. It is poor, even by 
India’s standards, with an annual per capita income of $675, compared 
with $730 nationwide. (The figure in the United States is about $25,000.)

But Kerala’s life expectancy is nearly 74 years — 11 years longer than 
the Indian average and approaching the American average of 77 years. Its 
literacy rate, 91 percent, compares to an Indian average of 65 percent, 
and an American rate the United Nations estimates at 99 percent.

Those enviable outcomes, its supporters stress, are a result of policy 
choices: Kerala spends 36 percent more on education than the average 
Indian state and 46 percent more on health.

“The fact that quality of life can be improved through government 
intervention, even in societies that are very poor — I think that’s 
important,” said Prabhat Patnaik, the vice chairman of the state 
planning board. Kerala’s experience, he said, shows “the quality of life 
is not just related to the growth rate” of the economy.

“Put it in the context of any other part of the developing world and its 
achievements still stand out as remarkable,” said Richard Franke, an 
anthropologist at Montclair State University in New Jersey. “Children 
don’t die in the first year of life, boys and girls have approximately 
equal life chances, they get educated, and they live long lives.”

He added, “The Kerala model stands as a great achievement, with or 
without migration.”

Kerala’s culture of human investment is at least two centuries years old 
and owes early debts to the missionaries and maharajahs who emphasized 
schools. By the early 20th century, literate Keralites were already 
migrating internally, to work as clerks in Delhi and Bombay, and sending 
money home.

Kerala was equally well known as a font of leftist politics. The 
Communist Party came to power in 1957, a year after statehood, and has 
ruled on and off since. The state transferred land from the rich to the 
poor, set a minimum wage and invested heavily in clinics and schools.

Though Kerala’s tax rates have been comparable to other Indian states’, 
its collection rates have been higher, and it has spent more on 
education and health.

It also gained a reputation as a place hostile to business, with heavy 
regulation, militant unions and frequent strikes. There are fishing jobs 
but little industry and weak agriculture. Government is the largest 
employer; many people run tenuous businesses like tea shops or tiny stores.

Talk of the Kerala model began after a 1975 United Nations report 
praised the state’s “impressive advances in the spheres of health and 
education.” Starved for success stories from the developing world, 
experts noticed.

Amartya Sen, a future Nobel laureate in economics, wrote widely on 
Kerala, arguing (in a book with Jean Dreze) that its “outstanding social 
achievements” were of “far-reaching significance” in other countries. In 
a book on three places that inspire global hope, Bill McKibben, an 
American, wrote that “Kerala demonstrates that a low-level economy can 
create a decent life” and shows that “sharing works.”

Yet even as Kerala gained fame, large numbers of its workers were 
leaving. The Persian Gulf needed labor, and Keralites were used to 
traveling for jobs. The number of overseas workers doubled in the 1980s, 
and then tripled in the 1990s. In a state of 32 million where 
unemployment approaches 20 percent, one Keralite worker in six now works 
overseas. The largest number work at taxing construction jobs, outdoors 
in the Arabian sun, though high literacy allows some Keralites to land 
office work.

Without migrant earnings, critics say, the state’s luster could not be 
sustained. The $5 billion that Keralite migrants send home augment the 
state’s economic output by nearly 25 percent. Migrants’ families are 
three times as likely as those of nonmigrants to live in superior 
housing, and about twice as likely to have telephones, refrigerators and 
cars. Men seeking wives place newspaper ads, describing themselves as 
“handsome, teetotaler, foreign-employed” or “God-fearing and working in 
Dubai.”

“The gulf is the biggest factor in sustaining a higher quality of life,” 
said B. A. Prakesh, an economist at the University of Kerala.

At its best, migration produces stories like that of Benjamin Fernandez, 
55, who moved to the United Arab Emirates 30 years ago as a secretary 
and now owns a construction firm there. He built a big house in India 
with a teak spiral staircase and educated his daughters in private 
schools. One is studying to be a doctor, and the other is applying to 
business school. “The U.A.E. built a life for us,” he said.

Yet the suicide rate in Kerala is four times the national average, and 
there are also families like that of Shirley Justus, 45, who struggled 
to raise three daughters by herself while her husband drove trucks in 
Muscat and Dubai. Her oldest, Suji, graduated from high school last year 
and made two study plans, one aimed at England and the other at Mumbai, 
formerly known as Bombay. Ms. Justus, afraid to be responsible for 
letting her go, vetoed both ideas. Her daughter obeyed with little 
complaint and then hanged herself.

“If my husband was here, she wouldn’t have done this,” said Ms. Justus, 
who has made her living room a shrine to her daughter and her life a 
search for answers. “He would have solved the problem.”

With nearly a quarter of the money migrants send home being spent on 
education, some Keralites experience a painful cycle: migration buys 
education, which leads to more migration. Educated Keralites, more 
choosy about jobs, are more likely to be unemployed.

In the family of James John Pereira, literacy and migration have been 
intertwined for nearly 100 years, since his father left to work as a 
valet on a Sri Lankan plantation. His earnings put Mr. Pereira through 
private school, and Mr. Pereira’s 49 years abroad as a clerk did the 
same for his five children, all of whom earned master’s degrees.

But three are now working abroad themselves, as is the husband of a 
fourth, Jacqueline, who is raising a 10-year-old daughter by herself. 
“The literacy rate here is great,” she said, “and unemployment is much 
greater.”

Kerala’s homegrown critics say such stories underscore the problems of a 
strategy that severs human development and economic growth. “Keralites 
are developing the gulf economy,” Professor Rajan, the demographer, 
said. “They are not developing our economy.”

Professor Franke, the Kerala admirer, said the economic forces that lead 
people to migrate were beyond the state’s control. “But what’s unique 
about Kerala is that the benefits are likely to be shared in a more fair 
and just way,” he said.

“I wouldn’t say it discredits the model,” Mr. Franke said of Kerala’s 
migration. “It shows that it has weaknesses.”

________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism