How did these people become so different from the rest of India? Were they always like this by nature...if so why are they so backwards. It seems like their backs are in the gutter but their faces looking at the stars. There is something strikingly different about their mass psychology and cohesiveness but this guy doesnt address WHY or HOW this came about.
What is True Development? The Kerala Model
Kerala (pronounced ker'uh luh) , a state of 29 million people in
southern India, is poor--even for India--with a per capita income
estimated by various surveys to be between $298 and $350 a year, about
one-seventieth the American average. When the American anthropologist
Richard Franke surveyed the typical Keralite village of Nadur in the
late 1980s, he found that nearly half the 170 families had only cooking
utensils, a wooden bench, and a few stools in their homes. No
beds--that was the sum of their possessions. Thirty-six percent also
had some chairs and cots, and 19 percent owned a table. In five
households he discovered cushioned seats. But here is the odd part.
* The life expectancy for a North American male, with all his chairs
and cushions, is 72 years, while the life expectancy for a Keralite
male is 70.
* After the latest in a long series of literacy campaigns, the
United Nations in 1991 certified Kerala as 100 percent literate. Your
chances of having an informed conversation are at least as high in
Kerala as in Kansas.
* Kerala's birth rate hovers near 18 per thousand, compared with 16 per thousand in the United States--and is falling faster.
Demographically, in other words, Kerala mirrors the United States on
about one-seventieth the cash. It has problems, of course: There is
chronic unemployment, a stagnant economy that may have trouble coping
with world markets, and a budget deficit that is often described as out
of control. But these are the kinds of problems you find in France.
Kerala utterly lacks the squalid drama of the Third World--the beggars
reaching through the car window, the children with distended bellies,
the baby girls left to die.
In countries of comparable income, including other states of India,
life expectancy is 58 years, and only half the people (and perhaps a
third of the women) can read and write; the birth rate hovers around 40
per thousand. Development experts use an index they call PQLI, for
"physical quality of life index," a composite that runs on a scale from
zero to a hundred and combines most of the basic indicators of a decent
human life.
In 1981, Kerala's score of 82 far exceeded all of Africa's, and in
Asia only the incomparably richer South Korea (85), Taiwan (87), and
Japan (98) ranked higher. And Kerala kept improving. By 1989, its score
had risen to 88, compared with a total of 60 for the rest of India. It
has managed all this even though it's among the most densely crowded
places on earth--the population of California squeezed into a state the
size of Switzerland. Not even the diversity of its population--60
percent Hindu, 20 percent Muslim, 20 percent Christian, a recipe for
chronic low-grade warfare in the rest of India--has stood in its way.
It is, in other words, weird--like one of those places where the
starship Enterprise might land that superficially resembles Earth but
is slightly off. It undercuts maxims about the world we consider almost
intuitive: Rich people are healthier, rich people live longer, rich
people have more opportunity for education, rich people have fewer
children. We know all these things to be true--and yet here is a
countercase, a demographic Himalaya suddenly rising on our mental
atlas. It's as if someone demonstrated in a lab that flame didn't
necessarily need oxygen, or that water could freeze at 60 degrees. It
demands a new chemistry to explain it, a whole new science.
In the morning, every road in Kerala is lined with boys and girls
walking to school. Depending on their school, their uniforms are bright
blue, bright green, bright red. It may be sentimental to say that their
eyes are bright as well, but of all the subtle corrosives that broke
down the old order and gave rise to the new Kerala, surely none is as
important as the spread of education to an extent unprecedented and as
yet unmatched in the Third World. Though Christian missionaries and the
British started the process, it took the militance of the caste-reform
groups and then of the budding left to spread education widely. The
first great boom was in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in southern
Kerala, where the princes acceded to popular demands for ever more
schools. When leftists dominated politics in the 1960s, they spread the
educational programs into Malabar, the northern state that had been
ruled directly by the British, and began granting
scholarships to untouchables and tribal peoples. By 1981, the
general literacy rate in Kerala was 70 percent--twice the all-India
rate of 36 percent. Even more impressive, the rural literacy rate was
essentially identical, and female literacy, at 66 percent, was not far
behind. Kerala was a strange spike on the dismal chart of Third World
literacy. The government, particularly the leftists who governed for
much of the late 1980s, continued to press the issue, aiming for "total
literacy," usually defined as a population where about 95 percent can
read and write.
The pilot project began in the Ernakulam region, an area of 3
million people that includes the city of Cochin. In late 1988, 50,000
volunteers fanned out around the district, tracking down 175,000
illiterates between the ages of 5 and 60, two-thirds of them women. The
leftist People's Science Movement recruited 20,000 volunteer tutors and
sent them out to teach. Within a year, it was hoped, the illiterates
would read Malayalam at 30 words a minute, copy a text at 7 words a
minute, count and write from 1 to 100, and add and subtract three-digit
numbers. The larger goal was to make people feel powerful, feel
involved; the early lessons were organized around Brazilian teacher
Paolo Freire's notion that the concrete problems of people's lives
provide the best teaching material. "Classes were held in cowsheds, in
the open air, in courtyards," one leader told the New York Times. "For
fishermen we went to the seashore. In the hills, tribal groups sat on
rocks. Leprosy patients were taught to hold a pencil in stumps of hands
with rubber bands. We have not left anyone out." For those with poor
eyesight, volunteers collected 50,000 donated pairs of old eyeglasses
and learned from doctors how to match them with recipients. On February
4, 1990, 13 months after the initial canvass, Indian prime minister
V.P. Singh marked the start of World Literacy Year with a trip to
Ernakulam, declaring it the country's first totally literate district.
Of the 175,000 students, 135,000 scored 80 percent or better on the
final test, putting the region's official literacy rate above 96
percent; many of the others stayed in follow-up classes and probably
had learned enough to read bus signs. The total cost of the 150 hours
of education was about $26 per person. Organizers knew the campaign was
working when letters from the newly literate began arriving in
government offices, demanding paved roads and hospitals.
Many people, sincerely alarmed by the world's ever-expanding
population, have decided that we need laws to stop the growth, that,
sad as such coercion would be, it's a necessary step. And they have
some cases to point to--China, for instance, where massive government
force probably did manage to contain a population that would otherwise
have grown beyond its ability to feed itself. But as that country frees
itself from the grip of the communists, the pent-up demand for children
may well touch off a massive baby boom. Compulsion "does not work
except in the very short term," writes Paul Harrison in his book The
Third Revolution (Viking Penguin, 1993), and his case in point is
India, which tried to raise its rate of sterilization dramatically in
the 1970s. To obtain recruits for the "vasectomy camps" erected
throughout the country, the government withheld licenses for shops and
vehicles, refused to grant food ration cards or supply canal water for
irrigation, and in some cases simply sent the police to round up
"volunteers." It worked, in a sense: In 1976, 8.3 million Indians were
sterilized. But Indira Gandhi lost the next election largely as a
result, the campaign was called off, and it was "ten years before the
number of couples using modern contraception rose again to their
1972-73 peaks," Harrison writes. India's population, which grew by 109
million in the 1960s and 137 million in the 1970s, grew 160 million in
the 1980s. That is the population of two Mexicos, or one Eisenhower-era
United States.
Kerala--and a scattered collection of other spots around the world,
now drawing new attention in the wake of the United Nations' Cairo
summit on population--makes clear that coercion is unnecessary. In
Kerala the birth rate is 40 percent below that of India as a whole and
almost 60 percent below the rate for poor countries in general. In
fact, a 1992 survey found that the birth rate had fallen to replacement
level. That is to say, Kerala has solved one-third of the equation that
drives environmental destruction the world over. And, defying
conventional wisdom, it has done so without rapid economic growth--has
done so without becoming a huge consumer of resources and thus
destroying the environment in other ways.
"The two-child family is the social norm here now," said M.N.
Sivaram, the Trivandrum--capital of Kerala--representative of the
International Family Planning Association, as we sat in his office,
surrounded by family-planning posters. "Even among illiterate women we
find it's true. When we send our surveyors out, people are embarrassed
to say if they have more than two kids. Seven or eight years ago, the
norm was three children and we thought we were doing pretty good. Now
it's two, and among the most educated people, it's one."
Many factors contribute to the new notion of what's proper. The
pressure on land is intense, of course, and most people can't support
huge families on their small parcels. But that hasn't stopped others
around the world. More powerful, perhaps, has been the spread of
education across Kerala. Literate women are better able to take charge
of their lives; the typical woman marries at 22 in Kerala, compared to
18 in the rest of India. On average around the world, women with at
least an elementary education bear two children fewer than uneducated
women. What's more, they also want a good education for their children.
In many cases that means private schools to supplement public
education, and people can't afford several tuitions. Kerala's
remarkable access to affordable health care has provided a similar
double blessing. There's a dispensary every few kilometers where IUDs
and other forms of birth control are freely available, and that helps.
But the same clinic provides cheap health care for children, and that
helps even more. With virtually all mothers taught to breast-feed, and
a state-supported nutrition program for pregnant and new mothers,
infant mortality in 1991 was 17 per thousand, compared with 91 for
low-income countries generally. Someplace between those two figures--17
and 91--lies the point where people become confident that their
children will survive. The typical fertility for traditional societies,
says Harrison, is about seven children per woman, which "represents not
just indiscriminate breeding, but the result of careful strategy."
Women needed one or two sons to take care of them if they were widowed,
and where child mortality was high this meant having three sons and, on
average, six children. In a society where girls seem as useful as boys,
and where children die infrequently, reason suddenly dictates one or
two children. "I have one child, and I am depending on her to survive,"
said Mr. Sivaram. "If I ever became insecure about that, perhaps my
views would change."
Kerala's attitude toward female children is an anomaly as well. Of
8,000 abortions performed at one Bombay clinic in the early 1990s,
7,999 were female fetuses. Girl children who are allowed to live are
often given less food, less education, and less health care, a bias not
confined to India. In China, with its fierce birth control, there were
113 boys for every 100 girls under the age of 1 in 1990. There are, in
short, millions and millions of women missing around the world--women
who would be there were it not for the dictates of custom and economy.
So it is a remarkable achievement in Kerala to say simply this: There
are more women than men. In India as a whole, the 1991 census found
that there were about 929 women per 1,000 men; in Kerala, the number
was 1,040 women, about where it should be. And the female life
expectancy in Kerala exceeds that of the male, just as it does in the
developed world.
Whatever the historical reasons, this quartet of emancipations--from
caste distinction, religious hatred, the powerlessness of illiteracy,
and the worst forms of gender discrimination--has left the state with a
distinctive feel, a flavor of place that influences every aspect of its
life. It is, for one thing, an intensely political region: Early in the
morning in tea shops across Kerala, people eat a dosha and read one of
the two or three Malayalam-language papers that arrive on the first
bus. (Kerala has the highest newspaper-consumption per capita of any
spot in India.) In each town square political parties maintain their
icons--a statue of Indira Gandhi (the white streak in her hair
carefully painted in) or a portrait of Marx, Engels, and Lenin in
careful profile. Strikes, agitations, and "stirs," a sort of wildcat
job action, are so common as to be almost unnoticeable. One morning
while I was there, the Indian Express ran stories on a bus strike, a
planned strike of medical students over "unreasonable exam schedules,"
and a call from a leftist leader for the government to take over a coat
factory where striking workers had been locked out. By the next day's
paper the bus strike had ended, but a bank strike had begun. Worse, the
men who perform the traditional and much beloved kathakali dance--a
stylized ballet that can last all night--were threatening to strike;
they were planning a march in full costume and makeup through the
streets of the capital.
Sometimes all the disputation can be overwhelming. In a long account
of his home village, Thulavady, K.E. Verghese says that "politics are
much in the air and it is difficult to escape from them. Even elderly
women who are not interested are dragged into politics." After several
fights, he reports, a barbershop posted a sign on the wall: "No
political discussions, please." But for the most part the various
campaigns and protests seem a sign of self-confidence and political
vitality, a vast improvement over the apathy, powerlessness, ignorance,
or tribalism that governs many Third World communities.
How can the Kerala model spread to other places with different
cultures, less benign histories? Unfortunately, there's another
question about the future that needs to be answered first: Can the
Kerala model survive even in Kerala, or will it be remembered chiefly
as an isolated and short-term outbreak from a prison of poverty? In the
paddy fields near Mitraniketan, bare-chested men swung hoes hard into
the newly harvested fields, preparing the ground for the next crop.
They worked steadily but without hurry--in part because there was no
next job to get to. Unemployment and underemployment have been signal
problems in Kerala for decades. As much as a quarter of the state's
population may be without jobs; in rural villages, by many estimates,
laborers are happy for 70 or 80 days a year of hoe and sickle work. And
though the liberal pension and unemployment compensation laws, and the
land reform that has left most people with at least a few coconut trees
in their house compound, buffer the worst effects of joblessness, it is
nonetheless a real problem: In mid-morning, in the small village at the
edge of the rice fields, young men lounge in doorways with nothing to
do.
To some extent, successes are surely to blame. A recent report
published by the Centre for Development Studies looked at the coir
(coconut fiber), cashew processing, and cigarette industries and
concluded that as unions succeeded in raising wages and improving
working conditions, they were also driving factories off to more
degraded parts of India. Kerala's vaunted educational system may also
play a role. Because of what they are taught, writes M.A. Oommen,
"university graduates become seekers of jobs rather than creators of
jobs." In Kerala, says K.K. George of the Centre for Development
Studies, "the concept of a job is a job in a ministry. When you get out
of school you think: `The state should give me a job as a clerk'"--an
understandable attitude, since government service is relatively
lucrative, completely secure, and over, by law, at age 55. Large
numbers of Keralites also go into medicine, law, and teaching. That
they perform well is proved by their success in finding jobs abroad--as
many as a quarter million Keralites work at times in the Persian
Gulf--but at home there is less demand.
The combination of a stagnant economy and a strong commitment to
providing health and education have left the state with large budget
deficits. Development expert Joseph Collins, for all his praise of
progress, calls it a "bloated social welfare state without the economy
to support it," a place that has developed a "populist welfare culture,
where all the parties are into promising more goodies, which means more
deficits. The mentality that things don't have to be funded, that's
strong in Kerala--in the midst of the fiscal crisis that was going on
while I was there, some of the parties were demanding that the
agricultural pension be doubled."
But the left seems to be waking up to the problems. Professor Thomas
Isaac--described to me as a "24-karat Marxist" and as a wheel in the
Communist Party--said, "Our main effort has been to redistribute, not
to manage, the economy. But because we on the left have real power, we
need to have an active interest in that management--to formulate a new
policy toward production." Instead of building huge factories, or
lowering wages to grab jobs from elsewhere, or collectivizing farmers,
the left has embarked on a series of "new democratic initiatives" that
come as close as anything on the planet to actually incarnating
"sustainable development," that buzzword beloved of environmentalists.
The left has proposed, and on a small scale has begun, the People's
Resource Mapping Program, an attempt to move beyond word literacy to
"land literacy."
Residents of local villages have begun assembling detailed maps of
their area, showing topography, soil type, depth to the water table,
and depth to bedrock. Information in hand, local people could sit down
and see, for instance, where planting a grove of trees would prevent
erosion. And the mapmakers think about local human problems, too. In
one village, for instance, residents were spending scarce cash during
the dry season to buy vegetables imported from elsewhere in India.
Paddy owners were asked to lease their land free of charge between rice
crops for market gardens, which were sited by referring to the maps of
soil types and the water table. Twenty-five hundred otherwise
unemployed youth tended the gardens, and the vegetables were sold at
the local market for less than the cost of the imports. This is the
direct opposite of a global market. It is exquisitely local--it demands
democracy, literacy, participation, cooperation. The new vegetables
represent "economic growth" of a sort that does much good and no harm.
The number of rupees consumed, and hence the liters of oil spent
packaging and shipping and advertising, go down, not up.
With high levels of education and ingrained commitment to fairness,
such novel strategies might well solve Kerala's economic woes,
especially since a stabilized population means it doesn't need to
sprint simply to stay in place. One can imagine, easily, a state that
manages to put more of its people to work for livable if low wages.
They would manufacture items that they need, grow their own food, and
participate in the world economy in a modest way, exporting workers and
some high-value foods like spices, and attracting some tourists.
"Instead of urbanization, ruralization," says K. Vishwanathan, a
longtime Gandhian activist who runs an orphanage and job-training
center where I spent several days. At his cooperative, near the
silkworm pods used to produce high-quality fabric, women learn to
repair small motors and transistor radios--to make things last, to
build a small-scale economy of permanence. "We don't need to become
commercial agents, to always be buying and selling this and that," says
Vishwanathan. He talks on into the evening, spinning a future at once
humble and exceedingly pleasant, much like the airy, tree-shaded
community he has built on once-abandoned land--a future as close to the
one envisioned by E. F. Schumacher or Thomas Jefferson or Gandhi as is
currently imaginable."What is the good life?" asks Vishwanathan. "The
good life is to be a good neighbor, to consider your neighbor as
yourself."
A small parade of development experts has passed through Kerala in
recent years, mainly to see how its successes might be repeated in
places like Vietnam and Mozambique. But Kerala may be as significant a
schoolhouse for the rich world as for the poor. "Kerala is the one
large human population on earth that currently meets the sustainability
criteria of simultaneous small families and low consumption," says Will
Alexander of the Food First Institute in San Francisco.
Kerala suggests a way out of two problems simultaneously--not only
the classic development goal of more food in bellies and more shoes on
feet, but also the emerging, equally essential task of living lightly
on the earth, using fewer resources, creating less waste. Kerala
demonstrates that a low-level economy can create a decent life,
abundant in the things--health, education, community--that are most
necessary for us all.
Gross national product is often used as a synonym for achievement,
but it is also an eloquent shorthand for gallons of gasoline burned,
stacks of garbage tossed out, quantities of timber sawn into boards.
One recent calculation showed that for every American dollar or its
equivalent spent anywhere on earth, half a liter of oil was consumed in
producing, packaging, and shipping the goods. One-seventieth the income
means one-seventieth the damage to the planet. So, on balance, if
Kerala and the United States manage to achieve the same physical
quality of life, Kerala is the vastly more successful society. Which is
not to say that we could ever live on as little as they do--or, indeed,
that they should. The right point is clearly somewhere in between.
Logical as a middle way might be, though, we've not yet even begun
to think about it in any real terms. We've clung to the belief that
perhaps someday everyone on earth will be as rich as we are--a belief
that seems utterly deluded in light of our growing environmental
awareness. Kerala does not tell us precisely how to remake the world.
But it does shake up our sense of what's obvious, and it offers a pair
of messages to the First World. One is that sharing works.
Redistribution has made Kerala a decent place to live, even without
much economic growth. The second and even more important lesson is that
some of our fears about simpler living are unjustified. It is not a
choice between suburban America and dying at 35, between agribusiness
and starvation, between 150 channels of television and ignorance. It is
a subversive reality, that stagnant/stable economy that serves its
people well, and in some ways it is a scary one. Kerala implies that
there is a point where rich and poor might meet and share a decent
life, and surely it offers new data for a critical question of our age:
How much is enough?
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