[lbo-talk] Re: Kerala and Cuba

kjkhoo at softhome.net kjkhoo at softhome.net
Fri Apr 25 00:05:41 PDT 2003


Ulhas Joglekar wrote:
>So what explains this difference between Kerala and West Bengal in your
>view? Why CPs have not been able to repeat Kerala performance in West
>Bengal?

Was just about to ask whether you could provide relative performance of various states as well as all-India average; also some baselines. All-India comes out low on the HDI rankings, below even Nicaragua!

One of the few things I know is that female enrolments in Kerala are very high, by all-India standards, whereas they are relatively low in West Bengal. What might account for that? The absence of males in Kerala -- all gone to work in the Gulf and elsewhere -- leaving women to decide whether girls go to school?

Also Arundhati Roy's novel points to the caste-ism of Kerala.

By the way, there was an interesting discussion on Kerala in the Bull of Concerned Asian Scholars in 1998 -- a lead article raising some issues of Kerala development, and a number of comments. The lead article was provocatively titled social development without economic development -- shades of Cuba, without the labour migration?



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