18
operational issues that fall under the jurisdiction of their immediate locality rather than that of
higher administrative levels.
Just as the Wenzhou model refers primarily to a set of characteristics that are bounded in
time, the Kerala model is similarly circumscribed in terms of what it refers to. But even on that
basis, a number of observers have expressed doubts about the extent of its success. First, the
effectiveness of Kerala’s redistributive reforms in meeting the basic needs of people in all tiers
of society has been questioned. Oliver Mendelsohn and Marika Vicziany have pointed out that
people in the lowest caste, the former untouchables, seem to be “fixed in a mould of poverty and
menial labor.”
39
Even though their literacy rate is only ten percent lower than the average in
Kerala, they are not completing higher levels of education, which would enable them to break
out of poverty.
40
In northern areas with a better-developed agrarian sector such as Punjab,
Haryana, the former untouchables earn more from agriculture than they do in Kerala.
Furthermore, infant and child mortality rates among former untouchables is double that of Kerala
Hindus. Taken together, these observations suggest limits on the effectiveness of Kerala’s basic
needs strategy.
A second major critique of the Kerala model is the paradoxical coexistence of high levels
of unemployment and labor shortage in the lowest paid sectors. On the one hand, by the early
1990s, Kerala’s unemployment rate of 14.63 percent was the highest of any Indian state and
accounted for almost 16 percent of India’s unemployed even though it only accounted for 3.4
percent of the population.
41
By 2003, its unemployment rate had increased to 20.77 percent.
42
39
Oliver Mendelsohn and Marika Vicziany, The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern
India (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 35.
40
Ibid, 169.
41
Joseph Tharamangalam, “The Social Roots of Kerala’s Development Debacle,” in Oommen, ed., Rethinking
Development, vol. 1, 183. A study by the Kerala Department of Economics and Statistics in 1989 estimated that
Convention