State of play
‘Nava Keralam’ (New Kerala) was the buzzword at the recent State conference of the CPI(M) in Ernakulam in which Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, a Polit Bureau member of the party, presented an alternative policy route to reinvigorate the ‘Kerala Model’ that was believed to have hit a stasis. According to the party honchos, a few factors made this road map imperative. While the State has ranked high on several social and sustainable development parameters, its inability to spur production, develop infrastructure and generate employment was telling. The recent turn of events including return migration and a change in its demographic added to the churn. But the last straw appeared to be the continuing jolt to fiscal federalism and the GST regime, which tightened the noose around the State’s finances.
The last time the party, the undivided CPI, embraced such a vision plan was in 1956, a year before the world’s first democratically elected Communist government came to power in Kerala. Successive governments thereafter prioritised welfare over growth with commendable outcomes. But what makes the present vision document, which has not been released in public pending discussions within the LDF, radically different is that it refocuses on accelerating production and growth with the aid of ‘private investment’, once anathema to the Left parties, while not forgoing the government’s commitment to welfarism or environment conservation.
This sparked a debate on whether the CPI(M) has relinquished its ideological adherence to socialism. The party idealogues pointed towards China and Cuba and said that the effort was to marry the ‘best practices’ in socialist economies and capitalist countries in order to evolve a model that would provide for growth and development while ensuring social justice and uplift of the poor. Therefore, when the party came under fire for making a pitched call in the document for setting up research-oriented higher educational institutions in “government, cooperative and private sectors and in the private-public-partnership model”, the defence was that this was critical for turning Kerala into a ‘knowledge economy’. While it welcomes private investment, the document also proposes the creation of a monitoring framework for ensuring social justice and maintaining the quality of higher education “in the private sector as well”.
A week after the CPI(M) State meet got over, the State Budget took a step further on ‘knowledge economy’ by announcing specific schemes with allocations. It sought private investment for industrial facilitation parks under public sector units to augment industrial growth and proposed to set up four science parks, at ₹1,000 crore, in three years for applied scientific research in highly specialised areas such as microbiomes and genomics. A skill infrastructure ecosystem was envisaged, with 14 skill parks to boot, under the Knowledge Economy Mission seeking to provide 20 lakh job opportunities. It said there would be translational research centres, startups and incubators on university campus, thereby dovetailing higher academic research and industry – a move intended to stimulate value-added production.
While the Kerala Infrastructure Investment Fund Board (KIIFB) is still being relied on for infrastructure expansion, there’s a perception that it should not be a case of all eggs in a single basket, more so because the KIIFB has become an eyesore of sorts for the Centre. That puts the government in a quandary as it has lined up a slew of ambitious projects. Hence, the need to explore alternative sources of funding.
It’s a given that the ‘Kerala model’ is at a crossroads. The vision plan, however contested, could pave the way for a new development paradigm for Kerala, by plugging the loopholes in the existing one.
anandan.s@thehindu.co.in
