The investments made in public education and healthcare that helped Kerala emerge as a strong state in human development over decades can be the springboard for the state to look ahead, said Nobel laureate economist Prof Amartya Sen in his address to the Valedictory session of the three-day Kerala Looks Ahead (KLA) Conference and Consultation hosted by the State Planning Board.
“This reliance on humanity, reliance on reasoning and reliance on public discussion are central assets, which I think Kerala will have use for in the future,” said Prof Sen. Recalling his long association with the State dating back to 1950s, Prof Sen said many thought at the time that Kerala’s quest for universal education and healthcare was going to be a disaster, though he was optimistic that it would succeed.
“Kerala was one of the three poorest economies in India at that time. There was a question, and I had some quarrels, or differences of opinion, within the Delhi School of Economics, on whether Kerala could afford to have education for all, health care for all, and social security for all, given the fact that the State was so very poor. And of course I told them to look at many factors, including the fact that being poor means that labour costs were also rather low. And on the one hand you need to spend more, but the spending was moderated by the fact that the wages were lower in Kerala.”
“I am talking about all that because I was then told that Kerala wouldn’t succeed. Well, then it so happened that, within a couple of decades, Kerala had not only moved away from that position, but was competing for being one of the top three rather than the bottom three in terms of per capita expenditure, which is the subject on which we have data, but constitutes per capita income in fact. Therefore, in a while, of course Kerala also became the richest state in India in terms of per capita income,” Prof Sen said.
“Now, when we look at the successes and failures today, this focus on labour has to be seen as being very, very important because of the fact that nothing is as important productively as what happens to the attitude of human beings to change, to progress”, he said.
“So I would say that the successful use of humanity, the concentration on human reasoning, the particular focus on public discussion whereby we learn from each other and if there is a different view and then, we criticise each other for it — these are features that have been part of the Kerala economic strategy.”
In this context, he said he would be personally very optimistic about Kerala looking to the future. But optimistic not just because it has been successful in the past, but also because we can understand why it has been successful, what it is that made it different, Prof Sen said.
“I was fortunate when I was in those early days in Delhi — when I was arguing with my colleagues in the Delhi School of Economics that Kerala could be a world-beater — when I was being told that I was being blinded by political prejudice.
Recalling that he had the opportunity to meet and talk with leaders like EMS Namboodiripad a lot, he said there is no substitute to an enquiring mind, a mind that has, as Rabindranath Tagore said, that has not been blocked off, by free flows being choked. “In Kerala, the free flow has not been choked, and I hope it will not be choked. But in order to pursue the future with the same success and more than in the past, it needs to keep the mind open, to ask the question again and again: “Are we doing the right thing?”, he added.
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