SAD PLIGHT OF KERALA- AN ARTICLE BY SHASHI THAROOR
A couple of years ago, I was invited to address the Trivandrum Management
Association on the subject "energizing Kerala". I found that odd, because
the only place in the world where Keralites seem to need energizing is
Kerala. Look around the planet, and you see Keralites everywhere, working
extremely hard, from menial jobs in the Gulf to professorships in the
States, displaying their entrepreneurial energies and achieving remarkable
successes. So what is it that holds them back here, in their home state? Is
it resources, policies, attitudes, politics? All of the above?
It's always been a curious paradox that Keralites put in long hours in
places like the Gulf, where they have earned a reputation for being
hard-working and utterly reliable, while at home they are seen as indolent
and strike-prone. Surely the same people couldn't be so different in two
different places? And yet they are – for one simple reason: the politicized
environment at home. It's a reputation that has come to haunt Kerala.
Several people told me the story of how BMW had been persuaded to install a
car-manufacturing plant in the state, thanks to generous concessions by the
UDF government. But the very day the BMW executives arrived in Kerala to
sign the deal, they were greeted by a "bandh": the State had shut down over
some marginal political issue, cars were being blocked on the streets, shops
were closed by a hartal. It had nothing to do with BMW or with foreign
investment, but the executives beat a hasty retreat. The plant was set up
in Tamil Nadu.
The irony is that Kerala has got some essential things right. One famous
study has established some astonishing parallels between the United States
and the state of Kerala. The life expectancy of a male American is 72, that
of a male Keralite 70. The literacy rate in the United States is 95%; in
Kerala it is 99%. The birth rate in the US is 16 per thousand; in Kerala it
is 18 per thousand, but it is falling faster. The gender ratio in the United
States is 1050 females to 1000 males; in Kerala it is 1040 to 1000, and that
in a country where neglect of female children has dropped the Indian
national ratio to 930 women for 1000 men. Death rates are also comparable,
as are the number of hospital beds per 100,000 population and the number of
newspapers per 10,000 population (where Kerala is ahead of the US). The
major difference is that the annual per capita income in Kerala is around
$300 to $350, whereas in the US it is $22,500, about seventy times as much.
Kerala has, in short, all the demographic indicators commonly associated
with "developed" countries, at a small fraction of the cost. Its success is
a reflection of what, in my book India: From Midnight to the Millennium
(Malayalam: "Ardha Ratri Muthal Nootande"), I have called the "Malayali
miracle": a state that has practised openness and tolerance from time
immemorial; which has made religious and ethnic diversity a part of its
daily life rather than a source of division; which has overcome caste
discrimination and class oppression through education, land reforms, and
political democracy; which has given its working men and women greater
rights and a higher minimum wage than anywhere else in India; and which has
honoured its women and enabled them to lead productive, fulfilling and
empowered lives.
And yet, despite all these strengths, it's difficult to deny that Kerala has
failed to move from its agrarian past into meaningful industrialization,
principally because it has acquired a less than positive reputation as a
place to invest. "Keralites are far too conscious of their rights and not
enough of their duties," one expatriate Malayali businessman told me. "It's
impossible to get any work done by a Keralite labour force – and then there
are those unions!" He sighed. "Every time we persuade an industrialist to
invest in Kerala, it ends badly." Citing the examples of the Gwalior Rayons
plant in Mavoor, the Premier Tyre factory in Kalamassery and the Apollo
Tyres plant in Chalakudi, my friend shook his head. "I am a Malayali," he
declared, "but I would not advise anyone to invest in Kerala."
This is what needs to change if we are not to languish in the margins of
India's development success story. The challenge remains. When he was kind
enough to launch my book, The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone,
(Malayalam: "Puthu Yugum, Puthu India"), our Chief Minister chided me for my
book's criticism of hartals, saying that it was through such popular
struggles that the people of Kerala had advanced. But even if that were
true, the advances of yesterday have already happened; the advances of
tomorrow require work, not hartals.
The fact is that we cannot afford to remain dependent on remittances from
abroad for 20% of our state's income because we have such an inhospitable
environment at home. We cannot languish in last place in the World Bank's
2009 "Doing Business in India" report, because it takes 210 days to obtain
approvals and permits in Kochi against 80 days in Hyderabad. We cannot live
with unusably narrow roads because we lack the courage to explain to
residents why they must be widened in the interests of all. We cannot have
one of the lowest rankings (lower than Orissa) in per capita information
technology exports. We cannot be a state that our best minds and most
skilled workers seek to flee because opportunities for remunerative work are
stifled by opportunistic politics.
Most of this newspaper's readers would be familiar with the story of the
sinking of the ocean-liner Titanic in the early years of the last century,
or at least have seen the film. For almost a hundred years till now, it was
believed that the sinking of the Titanic on her maiden voyage from
Southampton in England to New York in America was caused by the ship moving
too fast and the crew failing to see the iceberg before it was too late. But
now a new book, authored by a descendant of one of the officers of the ship,
says that it was not an accident caused by speed, but by a steering blunder.
It seems that the ship had plenty of time to miss the iceberg but the
helmsman actually panicked and turned the ship the wrong way, and by the
time the error was corrected, it was too late and the ship's side was
fatally holed by the iceberg. The error occurred because at the time,
seafaring was undergoing an enormous upheaval as a result of the conversion
from sail
to steam ships. The change meant there were two different steering systems
and different commands attached to them. When the First Officer spotted the
iceberg two miles away, his order was misinterpreted by the QuarterMaster,
who turned the ship left instead of right.
In a sense, Kerala's development failure has been like the story of the
Titanic. As with the confusion caused by the new era where sail ships were
being replaced by steamships, today those who rule us appear unsettled by
the global changes which have moved the economic system far beyond their old
paradigms and theories. By opposing computers and mobile phones, blocking
land acquisition for development work, and impeding economic reforms, they
have steered the ship of State left instead of right. If we don't steer it
back urgently, we are heading into the iceberg.
The fact is that there is nothing wrong with the ship -- Kerala, its people,
its resources or its potential. But we have to move with the times and not
be left behind where other states are moving forward by steering in the
right direction. Reliance on NRI remittances will not solve the basic
problem, since remittance money is essentially personal savings and spent on
conspicuous consumption, including purchase of land and the construction of
dwellings. Kerala has to attract the normal type of investment funds which
are being put to use by the rest of the country. This will only happen if we
are hospitable to investors.
This does not mean betraying our workers, but finding them work. It does not
mean giving up our values, but adding value to our economy. It does not mean
placing profit above people, but rather, using profits to benefit the
people.
We are seeing the beginnings of a counter-narrative. The Cochin Shipyard
recently succeeded in building huge Trader class ships for a Bermuda
company, ahead of deadline. Shipbuilding is a highly labour-intensive
industry; some 30 percent of the input is human labour, which is what makes
it ideal for us. The workers at Cochin Shipyard – unionized to a man – have
demonstrated that labour remains India's greatest asset, even in Kerala. It
does not have to be, as investors have long feared, a liability.
A visit to Trivandrum's pioneering Technopark confirms that even Kerala's
past failures at attracting and retaining heavy industry are now working in
the state's favour. CEO after CEO told me in glowing terms of their
satisfaction with the work environment in Kerala, the quality of the local
engineering graduates, and the beauty of the lush and tranquil surroundings.
Indeed, One Technopark firm told me of having bid for a contract with a
Houston-based company which had drawn up a short-list of Indian service
providers and placed the Trivandrum-based company last. The American
executives making the final decision flew down to India to inspect the six
shortlisted Indian firms. After three harrowing days ploughing through the
traffic congestion and pollution of Bombay, Bangalore, and Delhi, they
arrived in Trivandrum, checked into the Leela at Kovalam beach, sipped a
drink by the seaside at sunset -- and voted unanimously to give the contract
to the
Kerala firm. "If we have to visit India from time to time to see how our
contract is doing," the chief said, "we'd rather visit Kerala than any other
place in India."
We can and must build on this. Kerala needs to improve its creaking
infrastructure, improve its services sector, boost its IT exports, and take
advantage of its existing potential to become a knowledge economy. If a
Hyderabad company like Portal Player can design the iPod to be manufactured
in China for sale in the US, the next world-beating invention can come from
Keralite brains in Kerala. This will call for more than just investments
from NRKs. It will mean private sector players from abroad and elsewhere in
India deciding that investment in Kerala will pay for them. This will, above
all, need a change of mindset.
This is why I pursued the opportunity of bringing an IPL team to Kerala. I
was convinced that the only antidote to the hidebound statist mentality that
has produced such stagnation in Kerala would be the infusion of a venture
that is so 21st century in its conception and execution – not just boosting
the prospects of our cricketers, but igniting the imaginations of our young
people and opening new vistas for businesses, as well as promoting a new
surge of "cricket-related tourism" in our state. That investors from Gujarat
and Maharashtra were persuaded to team up to bring their venture to Kerala
is proof that we too can attract outsiders to invest in our future.
Similarly, to be a knowledge economy we have to open our mental horizons to
the world, rather than remaining embedded in the sterile dogmas of shopworn
and discredited ideologies. This is why I persuaded the organizers of the
world-famous Hay Festival of Literature to bring their Festival not just to
India but specifically to the capital of Kerala. The extraordinary
enthusiasm with which Hay was received by 3000 attendees in
Thiruvananthapuram reflects the hunger of our educated young Keralites to be
part of today's world rather than handmaidens of yesterday's. Kerala can be
India's intellectual centre, a distinction now abdicated by Bengal after
three decades of Marxist rule.
In the same spirit, I have pushed national and international firms to come
to the Trivandrum Technopark, the oldest in the country and yet the least
global in terms of its composition. HCL has acceded to myrequest and Oracle
is actively considering our pitch. Not even the Left disputes that IT is
perhaps the most important area for Kerala's future growth and development;
yet, despite the availability of educated young people, relatively low
operational costs and a congenial working environment, Kerala has failed to
break into the "Big League" because of our failure to attract the major
global companies like IBM, Intel or Oracle to set up shop in our state.
But we should also realize that a knowledge economy will not employ all
Keralites. We need to improve our agriculture too – particularly cereal,
vegetable and fruit production, including for export. And we have to be able
to develop industry beyond construction of houses for Gulf Malayalis!
We have already proved that we are capable of innovative change. Our late
"Leader", K. Karunakaran, took the bold step, in the teeth of Leftist
opposition, to initiate public-private partnership in 1994 in the
construction of Cochin International Airport (CIAL) at Nedumbassery, a model
of development only emulated a decade later in the rest of India. This is
why I have formally proposed that CIAL be renamed for him – not only to
honour him but also to inspire admiration for his innovativeness and
courage, qualities that Kerala so direly needs.
I believe that the Kerala that will succeed is one open to the contention of
ideas and interests within it, unafraid of the prowess or the products of
the outside world, wedded to the democratic pluralism that is our
civilization'
creative energies of its people. Such a Kerala is possible if we change our
attitudes and work with determination to fulfil it. God's Own Country no
longer deserves the business reputation of being the devil's playground
www.keralites.net |
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