What is true development? Kerala model

[Joydeep Mitra]

What is true development? Kerala model

by Bill McKibben: Source: THE UTNE LENS <http://www.utne.com/lens>

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?

Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature (Random House, 1989), The
Age of Mssing Information (Random House, 1992), and Hope, Human and Wild
(Little Brown, 1995).

Source: THE UTNE LENS <http://www.utne.com/lens>
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