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.
