Kerala, what?
Do you know Kerala? Well, if you haven’t so far heard about this “God’s Own Country”, the information era hasn’t really touched you meaningfully!
In the 1990s, when Richard Franke and Barbara Chasin talked about ‘development without growth’ while describing the Kerala model of development[1], some of you would have really doubted the possibility of a high social development without much economic growth.
If at all you have analyzed all the idiosyncrasies associated with being a bit left-oriented in any part of the world, did you ever come across the name Kerala as a tiny piece of land at the southern tip of India, which had one among the first few democratically elected communist governments in the world? However, the left couldn’t rule for ever just like that. They were thrown out and brought back, several times. The people of Kerala have been mercilessly objective and opportunistic about the kind of government they want. So, they aren’t completely and blindly leftists. This place, in fact, has been a ‘living lab’ for running coalition governments and perhaps for democracy itself in its unmutated form.
Did you ever know that Kerala’s PQL Index was almost at par with Europe even in the 1980s? For several years now, Kerala ranked number one among all states in India in terms of human development index. For hypothetical purposes, if Kerala was to be considered as a country, this would be the only state in India that the UN would consider having high human development since it has a score greater than 0.7 (in a scale of 0–1)[2]. In real terms, things would have actually gone a bit bad in the recent times, with life style diseases and new epidemics.
Around 1991, Kerala acquired the unique status of being India`s first state to have nearly 100% literacy. As early as 1901, in this region, there was one educational institution per 790 persons, which also roughly meant at least some kind of an institution per 1.9 sq. miles[3]. And so, Keralites rapidly spread across the world with their three Rs — Reading, (W)Riting and (A)Rithmetic.
In a clichéd joke, when Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon in 1969, he saw a flickering lantern at a distance. When he walked closer, he found a Malabari (Keralite) running a tiny tea shop there!
We (yes; I am proudly part of it) are omnipresent throughout the world, sometimes selling tea as we did in the Moon and sometimes even as a necessary evil at the top in governments and in corporate houses. Yet, like our little piece of land, we remain too tiny to be noticed, not only globally, but also within the country. Apart from the relatively small body structure, our musical, yet tongue-twisting language could be a culprit for this predicament of ours. Even after seventy years of independence, we still have to strenuously recall the Hindi vocabulary and grammar from our school text books to address our parliament at New Delhi. Often our ‘colonial past’ comes quite handy in the form of Manglish! Hailing from the land of Kathakali [4], we also manage the show with gestures and extreme facial expressions, which no other Indian can mime!
We had one of the finest reformers the world has ever seen — Sri Narayana Guru. If he was writing and preaching in English, the extent of influence he would have made in this world is unimaginable. Yes, one has to market the language first and then the products! Perhaps, we didn’t know the basics of marketing then!
But we are now in troubled waters, in its literal sense! If you aren’t aware about any of the aforesaid niceties about Kerala, we have something new and distressing! Just a few days ago, the nature was pouring out on our heads incessantly for nearly a week. Thirty-four dams, unable to bear the pregnancy any longer, were gushing out water, submerging almost all the districts in the state.
The water is yet to recede in many places; but calmness is sort of setting in, certainly with lots of worries about the future — worries about those who lost their dear ones, their houses and even their lands, leave alone the household things! Repeated landslides made their homes simply vanish along with the lands on which they stood. Unkindest disaster in a century!
More than 400 people lost their lives. It could have been easily a ten thousand at least, if the people of Kerala had not worked hand-in-hand with the government machinery and the limited army personnel deployed by the central government. But, most importantly, about 4500 fishermen took out around 650 of their traditional fishing boats into the ‘streets’ of Kerala and rescued at least 60000 people across the state[5]. What an army of professionals the state could silently organize from the very same community that was devastated in the Ockhi cyclone hardly a year ago?
As the darkness of the sky fades away allowing streaks of sunshine to fall on our shoulders, as water recedes and as hopes to rebuild kindle in every Keralite’s mind, we have new clouds looming above our heads — the clouds of politics, policies and procedures. No amount of money is sufficient to rebuild Kerala! But we again realize that we could be alone in this struggle of getting back to normalcy. Not that there aren’t people around to extend hands from different parts of the world. It appears our national policies do not allow these funds to flow that easily! When we strategize every aspect, things can become more politically correct than being humanly correct, not only in India but in any part of the world!
In between, I also sensed a clear attempt to corner the Kerala government from all sides through systematic fault finding mechanisms, mostly around the opening of the dam shutters and not being strict about land use practices. This is not a completely man-made disaster. Yes; if I were the chairperson of the state electricity authority, and if I was trained enough and had the technical and experiential knowledge to handle a situation like this, perhaps, I would have slowly started releasing water, even before the rain had actually started (say, when the probability of an incessant rain was 70 or 80%), just to create capacity for the fresh rain water, thereby preventing a large gush in a short time. But when you put general administrators at the top, the country and its people should also know that she or he need not have the technical and experiential knowledge of taking that important decision or convincing the government to do so in the shortest possible time. That requires some intuitive and experiential domain knowledge of high order. Now, let us imagine that some chairperson takes that decision to open the shutters earlier and there wasn’t much rain as predicted. After a year or so, the state audit and/or the newspapers will come up with an account of millions of (fictitious) loss and he may have to fight an unending legal battle (in a way similar to other technology related scams).
What is fairly evident in India as a whole is that the politicians and general administrators together have weakened the management of technology and technicalities in every sector, be it power, water, agriculture, health or transportation, by undermining professionals who are qualified and certified to do those jobs. Latest is the blatant encroachment into the sphere of academics and I am just wondering when it will get to things around space missions.
As of now, the newspaper reports say that the Kerala government is being offered free strategic planning by a global consulting firm. Free or paid, the success of any such holistic project substantially depends on the vision of our (the client) leadership and how the client is organized in terms of having a knowledgeable and coherent project team that closely follows, analyses and comments on the study. This needs real expertise on the client side too; not some jargon-level knowledge. The advantage of having a consultant is getting an unbiased opinion. However, even from the top consulting houses, there is no guarantee that you will get the best brains and minds (equally important), with the capability of some original thinking, creativity and innovation to do the actual work on the ground and offer that paradigm shift, if needed. Same is the case with any UN institution that provide similar services. To my knowledge, many in the wide varying UN institutions are like bureaucrats who will get the actual work done by hiring external consultants — mostly individual experts. Therefore, some wonder solution emerging out of such studies is somewhat unrealistic unless you clearly know the track record of the people who will actually do the work.
Almost all the TV channels ran marathon discussions on what next for Kerala. There was an apparent competition among the channels and among the speakers themselves to come out with those killer ideas that the government will immediately take note of, implement and Kerala will become the next Singapore (see below why I drag Singapore into the picture). There were intelligently-sensational opinions like the next disaster in Kerala will be fires in the skyscrapers killing hundreds of people, for example. Such warnings and predictions have no value more than statements emerging from common sense, because the probability of such events happening is extremely high, not only in Kerala but also in any part of the world!
Every time when I stayed in downtown Toronto for a month or so, I had to run out of the condominium in the middle of the night almost every week. Once it was -25 deg. C when we had to rush to the assembly point on the road around 5 AM. When fire actually happens, no matter whether it is in Toronto or New York or Kochi, the outcome is absolutely unpredictable even with all the fancy things fitted here and there to make us believe that things are under control and will be brought under control if something goes wrong! We know what happened just a year ago in one of the major cities where the final culprit was a kind of material used on the walls. Things are as trivial as this for disastrous outcomes.
For the past twenty years, one of my unchanged preferences in hotel booking was any floor up to the fourth or the fifth, lower-floor as they call it. My logic was simple. Even if there is a false alarm, I shouldn’t be running and panting for 15 to 20 minutes from the twentieth floor. So, when you have skyscrapers, a disaster from fire should be expected anytime like we now know that floods can happen anytime in Kerala. My point here is that we actually do not get any meaningful outcomes from such sensationalized debates. When you want to evolve an appropriate housing or transportation model or do a strategic development plan, you need to follow a methodology and you need a team with the right training, expertise and experiential knowledge to do it.
Now, the Singapore story. Even within the constraints of a large and complicated polity called India, Kerala may be able to aim at a paradigm shift similar to what Singapore did in the early 1970s. The Housing Board that Lee Kuan Yew established in the 1970s had the larger agenda of transforming the space constrained island into a world-class metropolis providing superior living conditions and mobility. And, the Economic Development Board did its best to build Singapore industries and businesses for wealth creation and to provide employment. Don’t we touch base with some fundamentals here?
While trying to comprehensively study (over a period of four years) the development problems and prospects of Kerala, I had proposed a region-specific integrated strategy around 1992 and a bit later through the first strategic plan made for the Kerala Bureau of Industrial promotion (K-BIP). Kerala, by now, should have had the excellent expertise to manage the waters around and within its tiny strip of land, for both mobility and economic development, akin to the Dutch way. Ironically, most parts of the present-day Kerala, as Princely States prior to the Indian independence, had well-managed inland waterways providing the backbone for trade and commerce. Perhaps, the generic national level infrastructure models and related funding sources insidiously killed these unique regional characteristics. I often wondered why Kerala, with its strategic location in an international sea route, could not focus on entrepôt trading to modernize its economy.
Kerala should now step back and think about (1) the economic activities that it wants to foster (2) the kind of habitat and housing that it wants to promote as a norm and (3) the required spatial planning and regulations to be introduced and implemented gradually and holistically. Kerala needs comprehensive ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT and SPATIAL PLAN for the next 20 years that clearly identifies what can and cannot be done and where. People need economic activities to live and to have a sense of purpose around their lives. Governments, through appropriate strategies and incentives, should open up avenues that are good for sustainability and quality of life, and discourage things that are harmful.
( Notes and references are given at the end after the FOOTNOTE below)
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FOOTNOTE FOR AN ACTION PLAN:
There is no doubt that the people of Kerala are determined to rise up from the debris like a phoenix! In doing so, there are two broad issues:
(A) Managing the disaster that has already happened in the shortest possible time and putting life back to normalcy for all.
(B) Rebuilding the State for a DIFFERENT and new future
As regards Disaster Management (DM), the priority now is to clean up, prevent epidemics and rehabilitate. For rehabilitation, we may have to do something like an H M L classification as follows:
H — High impact group having lost even their lands, complete house and/or many loved ones leaving behind one or two in the family.
M — Those who have lost their livelihoods, shops, businesses, etc. and cannot pull on.
L– Those whose households were inundated resulting in material loss of varying degrees.
Each category requires a different kind of attention and speed. The Government should immediately put a system, a task force and a hierarchy of empowerment to address things at the above three levels effectively, needless to mention about the role already being played by a large contingent of volunteers.
REBUILDING the State is another formidable challenge and therefore an opportunity too to do some right things for a DIFFERENT and a more SUSTAINABLE Kerala. Cyclones, flooding and similar calamities are increasing the world over. We should expect these to come again and again, but should prepare to survive fairly unaffected using appropriate policies, regulations, technologies and disaster management. This shall be the underlying principle. There shall be short-term (quick result) objectives and long-term strategic vision.
· Funds in the short-term: No amount of funding sources will be sufficient to rebuild Kerala soon, especially when the current system in the country is stifling some major cash inflows. Some autonomous institutions/NGOs may be authorized to seek support through reputed crowd funding platforms.
· Funds in the long term: Create an institutional mechanism that can source funds from all over the world, more so from the Indian diaspora, for specific projects and Special Purpose Vehicles of rebuilding on a long-term basis –without or with equity participation as in the case of the Cochin International Airport, soft-loans, development loans, etc.
· PUBLIC-PRIVATE-PARTNERSHIP should be the primary model in rebuilding. The audit systems in the country and the media should understand the need for this model and cooperate with the government without hampering projects with silly and erratic findings. If needed, the state should get special permissions with regard to the tendering procedures as part of the current rapid rebuilding process.
· COMPREHENSIVE DEVELOPMENT PLANNING: Do not get disturbed or carried away by the environmental saviors and their prophecies. We have a definite Development Problem on hand that needs extraordinary expertise, experiential knowledge and visioning capacity. We need to engage a team of top-class DEVELOPMENT PLANNERS now to work on our short-term and long-term development needs and do a vision and a plan for at least the next 20 years!
Regardless of this flood, subject to the findings of further detailed studies, I often consider that Kerala should aggressively promote economic activities and mobility plans that do not overload the scarce land but maximise the utilisation of its water bodies. I would imagine that Kerala has all the potential to nurture purely KNOWLEDGE BASED BUSINESSES (KBBs) and therefore put all its efforts to become a WORLD-CLASS:
- EDUCATIONAL HUB
- HEALTHCARE HUB
- TOURISM DESTINATION
- HUB for IT, R&D and other KBBs (without making the mistake of Bangalore)
At the same time, it is imperative to rejuvenate and modernize some of Kerals’s traditional sectors such as the fisheries[6], handloom and handicraft for a global market.
Needless to say that none of the above is possible without an enabling environment and comprehensive support systems. Some of the suggestions I had proposed to the Chief Minister, through a letter, when he assumed power four years ago are the following:
1. Integrated Transport Modelling and Management
- Kerala needs to reduce the pressure on its scarce land and exploit the lengthy coastline and the inland water connectivity. Unlike the other states, it needs to rejuvenate her water ways and introduce new and reliable water transport (sea and inland water) — cargo and passenger- through public-private-participation (PPP), but with stringent regulatory framework (as in the aviation industry). This will supplement and reduce the pressure on land and other modes.
- In fact, a multi-mode integrated (water-land-rail) transport network would be ideal, wherein an optimal combination of these would reduce the overburdening of any single mode such as roads, for instance.
- Policy initiatives to reduce household vehicles and simultaneously strengthening multi-mode mass/public transport systems will go a long way in reducing the load on transport infrastructure, needless to mention about its environmental and safety advantages.
2. Excellence in Education Mission
Convert at least 5 state-owned educational institutions into world-class institutions within the next five years — world class standards, both in academics and social/living infrastructure. Offer incentives to the private sector to enhance standards and to appear in popular university global rankings. The state could have its own accreditation procedure for providing incentives. The foregoing should spur a new approach in the higher education system in Kerala whereby it becomes a globally attractive destination for higher learning in less than a decade.
3. Health-4-All Mission
Immediate steps to maintain and constantly improve the Physical Quality of Life or liveability and social security
- Holistic and integrated waste management — Policies that deter generation (charge waste disposal into municipal systems), new integrated technologies, micro-management of waste at household level, promoting waste-to-energy and so on.
- Mosquito and other vector control
- Major and micro clean drinking water programs
- Health-4-All: Apart from hundred percent social security for healthcare, this initiative shall also aim at evolving a State Level Promotional and Regulatory Framework to nurture a reliable, efficient and robust Healthcare Industry in the public and private sectors to meet the global Tertiary Healthcare needs in specialized areas. Perhaps, what is lacking now is the regulatory framework, quality assurance and the poor related support services.
- Strengthening law and order; good and reliable welfare measures will enhance the morale of the police force and make them less corrupt.
4. Excellence in Profession Mission
There is an immediate need for nurturing a cadre of high calibre professionals and scientists in institutions that manage power, water, health and other infrastructure facilities. These professionals should see a clear but competitive career path in front of them and finally head these institutions rather than being subdued and subordinated by generalists who come from the administrative system. It is a shame in this 21st century to see highly technical institutions are headed by generalists pulled from general administration, police, forest service and so on. The brilliance to head these institutions shall be created through a systematic performance appraisal, training and retraining and internal competitive examinations. Some can opt for this hard and fast track by participating in these exercises, some can stay away and enjoy the normal channels of promotion and retire as number three or four. It is high time that a cadre of high calibre engineers, scientists, geologists and so on are groomed from within the respective departments.
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NOTES AND REFERENCES:
[1] Richard Franke and Barbara Chasin, ‘Development without Growth: The Kerala Experience’, Technology Review, April, 1990. pp. 42–50
[2] https://www.livemint.com/Politics/3KhGMVXGxXcGYBRMsmDCFO/Why-Kerala-is-like-Maldives-and-Uttar-Pradesh-Pakistan.html
[3] Michael Tharakan, ‘Socio-economic Factors in Educational Development: Case of Nineteenth Century Travancore’, Economic and Political Weekly, Nov. 10, 1984
[4] Kathakali is a traditional dance form of Kerala, communicated to audience through excellent footwork and impressive gestures of face and hands complimented with music and vocal performance.
[5] Figures from secondary sources.
[6] Our fishermen’s working and living conditions need to improve considerably. We need to see whether there are good lessons to learn from Norway; certainly not getting some mechanized boats and some processing machines from there as we did in the past.
