Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
nist parties fostered labor militancy, with the result that laborers would
regularly and freely stop business to protest anything, crushing entrepre-
neurialism and undermining the state's market leadership. As a result, the
state was scaring away high wage jobs, forcing many Keralites to emigrate
while creating an economy dependent on remitances.32 Other schol-
ars criticized the state and its welfare programs as unwieldy and overly
dirigiste
—that is, heavy handed, bureaucratic, and anti-free market:
“The inefficiencies of the state's apparatus—arising out of an over-
centralized, over politicized, and corrupt bureaucracy—have been the
bane of Kerala, retarding its development,” said one.33 Several others ac-
cused the government and political system of being top down and unre-
sponsive to the economic and political needs of people in the state.34
As a rejoinder to the economic enervation, charges that the state was
bureaucratically inefficient and top down, and other political and social
changes underway since the state's founding, Kerala's Communist-led
coalitions launched the People's Campaign for Decentralized Planning
in 1996. The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI[M]), which emerged
from the CPI), led its allies in the broader Left Democratic Front (LDF) in
implementing “the People's Plan,” as it was popularly known. The CPI(M)
described it as “democratic decentralization,” intended to beter involve
the people of the state in planning processes in a botom-up manner.35
The People's Plan gave local village communities called
grama sabha
s
control over 35 to 40 percent of the state's annual planning budget. These
individual communities now decide how to use state funds within their
constituency.36 The LDF also built several local-level institutions to em-
power Kerala's populace to get actively involved in this new process. For
example, the front fostered the development of women's neighborhood
groups, known as Kudumbashree, as subsets of grama sabhas, to increase
women's participation in political and economic maters. In meetings of
grama sabhas, atendees regularly discuss the state's annual and Five Year
Plans, development issues, and how to manage the health, education, and
transportation sectors in their communities. Significantly for the turn to-
ward organic agriculture, they also discuss environmental management,
because the People's Plan required local communities to map and docu-
ment their natural resources, to beter assist with planning. As a part of
