Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
3
The Third World's Model
for Development
In the 1990s, famed environmentalist Bill McKibben penned that
Kerala was “weird—like one of those places where the
Starship Enterprise
might land that superficially resembles Earth but is slightly off.”1 He went
on to laud the South Indian state as “the Mount Everest of social develop-
ment,” a place that stood out in the developing world.2
In writing these words, McKibben joined a crowd of development
practitioners, scholars, and politicians who had been praising Kerala for
decades as a “model for development.” As early as the 1970s, the anthro-
pologist Joan Mencher had described how increased educational levels
and the politicization of people in Kerala positively affected local com-
munities to demand beter health care.3 In the 1990s, another anthropol-
ogist, Richard W. Franke, along with sociologist Barbara Chasin, wrote
for the food policy think tank, Food First: “Kerala is an experiment in
radical reform as a modern development strategy.”4 Later in that decade,
riding the momentum of the international United Nations Conference on
Sustainable Development in Rio de Jainero, the scientist Govidan Parayil
cheered the state's performance in “sustainable development.”5 Well into
this century, researchers, writers, and Kerala's politicians have praised
Kerala's ongoing achievements in the realm of social development.6
This pile of accolades pivots around Kerala's high Human Develop-
ment Index (HDI), which measures education, life expectancy, and in-
come. The state's HDI has consistently been the highest of any Indian
