At a time when disillusion with neo-liberal development nostrums is mounting, alternative models of development are being revisited. Kerala's 30 million people may not have experienced rapid growth in GDP per capita, but they have for the past several decades achieved a remarkable social record in terms of adult literacy, infant mortality, life expectancy, stabilising population growth, and narrowing gender and spatial gaps.What are the implications of the disjuncture between human development and economic growth? What are the political, social and cultural factors responsible for Kerala's success? Does its human development record necessarily relate to sustainability in environmental terms? How inclusive has the Kerala model been, particularly for the fishing community and other socially marginalised groups?Can the new people's campaign for decentralised development from below make Kerala's development experience more enduring? What realistic view can be taken of its replicability elsewhere in India or further afield in the South? These are among the most important questions explored in this timely reassessment.

In the Global South, indigenous people have been continuously subjected to top-down, and often violent, processes of post-colonial state and nation building. This book examines the development dilemmas of the indigenous people (adivasis) of the Indian state of Kerala. It explores the different facets of change in their lives and livelihoods in the context of modernisation under different political regimes. As part of the Indian Union, Kerala followed a development approach in tune with the Government of India with regard to indigenous communities. However, within the framework of India’s quasi-federal polity, the state of Kerala has been tracing a development path of its own, which has come to be known as the ‘Kerala model of development’. Adopting a historical political economic approach, the book locates the adivasi communities in the larger contextual shifts from late colonialism through the post-independence years, and critically analyses the Kerala model of development with particular reference to the adivasis’ changing political status and rights to land. It pays special attention to policy dynamics in the neoliberal phase, and the actual practices of decentralisation as a way of including the socially excluded and marginalised. Offering a theoretical elaboration of the interaction between class and indigeneity based on intensive fieldwork in Kerala, the book addresses adivasi development in relation to the general development experience of Kerala, and goes on to relate this particular study to the global context of indigenous people’s struggles. It will be of interest to those working in the fields of South Asian Development, Political Economy and South Asian Politics.

This book is the most comprehensive analysis of the Kerala Model of Social Development to date. Using an interdisciplinary approach, it sheds new light on the paradoxes of the Indian state and critiques its model of economic development.

Demography is destiny for most populations. At this juncture of its demographic transition, it is, however, migration that is destiny for the Kerala population According to the first Kerala Migration Study (1999), migration had provided the single most dynamic factor in the otherwise dismal economic scenario of Kerala in the last quarter of the twentieth century. This Book documents Kerala's deepening socio-economic nexus with the Gulf countries through emigration based on the second Kerala Migration Survey conducted in 2004, funded the South Asian Network of Economic Institutes (SANE) and the special grant from the Centre for Development Studies, Kerala. It provides information on the size, trend, geographical distribution, socio-economic composition of migrants, and remittances sent home by migrants.// Analysis based on this new study indicates that migration is continuing to provide the most dynamic factor in the economic growth of Kerala State in the new century. The new century is likely to see migration encompassing a wider section of the Kerala population and the migration-impact spreading to newer sectors of the Kerala economy. Migrants of the 21st century would be structurally different from those of the 20th century. They would be better qualified and would be occupying higher positions in the job market abroad. The economic and political climate in the State seems to be becoming more receptive to profitable investments in developmental projects on a much larger scale in the coming decades. Emigration is likely to bring in, besides the much-needed capital, entrepreneurship and business leadership for Kerala's development. Migration is poised to determine more closely Kerala's destiny in the socio-economic development in the coming decades.

In this definitive history, a key figure in the People's Campaign in Kerala provides a unique insider's account of one of the world's most extensive and successful experiments in decentralization. Launched in 1996, the campaign mobilized over 3 million of Kerala's 30 million people and resulted in bottom-up development planning in all 1,052 of its villages and urban neighborhoods. The authors tell a powerful story of mass mobilization and innovation as bureaucratic opposition was overcome, corruption and cynicism were rooted out, and parliamentary democracy prevailed. Considering both the theoretical and applied significance of the campaign in the context both of India's development since independence and of recent international debates about decentralization, civil society, and empowerment, the book provides invaluable lessons for sustainable development worldwide.

Papers presented at the International Conference on Kerala's Development Experience organized in New Delhi from 8 to 11 December 1996.