Kerala (pronounced ker'uh luh), a state
of 29 million people in southern India, is poor--even for India--with
a per capita income estimated by various surveys to be between $298 and
$350 a year, about one-seventieth the American average. When the American
anthropologist Richard Franke surveyed the typical Keralite village
of Nadur in the late 1980s, he found that nearly half the 170 families
had only cooking utensils, a wooden bench, and a few stools in
their homes. No beds--that was the sum of their possessions. Thirty-six
percent also had some chairs and cots, and 19 percent owned a table.
In five households he discovered cushioned seats.
But here is
the odd part. The life expectancy for a North American male, with all his
chairs and cushions, is 72 years, while the life expectancy for a Keralite
male is 70. After the latest in a long series of literacy campaigns,
the United Nations in 1991 certified Kerala as 100 p ercent literate. Your
chances of having an informed conversation are at least as high in
Kerala as in Kansas. Kerala's birth rate hovers near 18 per thousand, compared
with 16 per thousand in the United States and is falling faster.
Demographically,
in other words, Kerala mirrors the United States on about one-seventieth
the cash. It has problems, of course: There is chronic unemployment, a
stagnant economy that may have trouble coping with world markets, and a
budget deficit that is often described as out of control. But these are
the kinds of problems you find in France. Kerala utterly lacks the squalid
drama of the Third World--the beggars reaching through the car window,
the children with distended bellies, the baby girls left to die.
In countries
of comparable income, including other states of India, life expectancy
is 58 years, and only half the people (and perhaps a third of the women)
can read and write; the birth rate hovers around 40 per thousand. Development
experts use an index they call PQLI, for "physical quality of life index,"
a composite that runs on a scale from zero to a hundred and combines most
of the basic indicators of a decent human life. In 1981, Kerala's score
of 82 far exceeded all of Africa's, and in Asia only the incomparably richer
South Korea (85), Taiwan (87), and Japan (98) ranked higher. And Kerala
kept improving. By 1989, its score had risen to 88, compared with a total
of 60 for the rest of India. It has managed all this even though it's among
the most densely crowded places on earth--the population of California
squeezed into a state the size of Switzerland. Not even the diversity of
its population--60 percent Hindu, 20 percent Muslim, 20 percent Christian,
a recipe for chronic low-grade warfare in the rest of the world--has stood
in its way.
It is,
in other words, weird--like one of those places where the starship Enterprise
might land that superficially resembles Earth but is slightly off. It undercuts
maxims about the world we consider almost intuitive: Rich people are healthier,
rich people live longer, rich people have more opportunity for education,
rich people have fewer children. We know all these things to be true--and
yet here is a countercase, a demographic Himalaya suddenly rising on our
mental atlas. It's as if someone demonstrated in a lab that flame didn't
necessarily need oxygen, or that water could freeze at 60 degrees. It demands
a new chemistry to explain it, a whole new science.
Kerala
emerged at the end of the eighth century, when a Hindu monarchy supplanted
a looser, feudal structure. The trade contacts of the ancient and early
medieval periods--Kerala's cardamom, pepper, turmeric, and other spices
were constant attractions (our word ginger derives from a word in the local
language, Malayalam)--eventually turned to more modern, and more exploitative,
colonial domination. By 1792, the British controlled what is now Kerala,
dividing it into three districts. The first hints of singularity came in
that colonial era. In the southern two-thirds of the state, the British
left the local princes on the throne. Hoping for an agricultural surplus
large enough to satisfy both themselves and the British, these rajahs offered
tax breaks for the reclamation of swamps and marshes, and they moved to
give tenant farmers more control over the land. "Development policy in
the whole world is generally considered to begin in the 1940s," says historian
Michael Tharakan. "But you can see the roots of it right from the beginning
of the 19th century in Kerala."
To conclude,
however, that Kerala under the British was becoming an enlightened and
democratic place would be a mistake. The tradition of caste, bulwark of
the Hindu rulers since the eighth century, was as strong as ever in the
nineteenth. At the top of the heap were the Namboodiri Brahmins, followed
by the Nairs--soldiers and administrators--and various artisanal classes.
Below all of them were the Ezhavas, roughly a fifth of the population,
who traditionally made their living climbing palms to harvest the coconuts,
and the Pulayas, the local untouchables. Within the various castes, innumerable
complicated subsets emerged, and the codes of conduct became ever stricter
and more degrading over time.
Kerala
is now less caste-ridden than any spot in the Hindu world; it is a transition
more complete than, say, the transformation achieved by the civil rights
movement in the American South. Looking backward, it is clear that some
of this epic, and mostly peaceful, change can be traced to new economic
conditions. As the British and the rajahs pushed cash crops instead of
subsistence farming, and as more and more tenant farmers became involved
with that market, the need for literacy, for instance, grew, and some of
the old customs became financially ruinous.
But a
purely economic explanation of singular history is as unsatisfying as calling
the Civil War a clash between industrial and agrarian economies. Economic
factors are clearer in hindsight; to those who lived through the changes,
they seemed much more dramatic and less inevitable."The large masses of
people accepted caste distinctions as part of the order of things" writes
M. K. Sanoo, a Keralite historian. "Each in his own set place, moving along
the orbit of caste, as if it was nature. The men of those days could
not even dream that any change was possible." Even Tharakan, a devout rationalist,
says, "Though these changes had an economic base, they were mediated at
the level of ethics, of moral dictums." Or, in plainer English, Kerala
too had its Lincolns, its Martin Luther Kings, and to understand this quick
and peaceful miracle--and perhaps to repeat it elsewhere--we need to catch
their temper, see the ideas they set loose.
Sri Narayana
Guru was born in 1856 to an Ezhava family--in proper holy-guy fashion,
in a hut "but a shade better than a cowshed." As a young man, he renounced
worldly attachments and began to wander, sitting in caves with legs crossed
and meditating, fasting, and consorting with lepers. As more people sought
him out for healing or advice, he and his disciples felt the need for a
regular temple for worshipping Shiva. At a beautiful spot in a river near
Aruvippuram, he had his followers build a small canopy of coconut leaves
and mango leaves over an altar on a rock jutting out in the water. The
year was 1888. "They improvised lamps with shells and arranged them in
rows. They were lighted at dusk and a piper began to play devotional tunes.The
whole place was soon filled with pious village folk." Sri Narayana, who
had been sitting apart and meditating all night, stood at midnight and
walked into the river. As thousands watched silently ("If silence had music,
the atmosphere was filled with it," wrote one correspondent) he descended
into the river and then reemerged, holding an idol of Shiva. He stood beneath
the canopy with it in his arms for three hours, totally lost in meditation,
tears flowing down his cheeks. Finally, at three in the morning, he installed
the idol on the pedestal. His action was the Keralite equivalent of overturning
the tables of the money changers, or refusing to give up a seat on
the bus. From the beginning of time, so far as anyone knew, only Brahmins
had ever installed an idol. "Yet when Swami performed the sacred rite it
appeared so natural for him to pick up a small rock and install it." When
Brahmin authorities arrived to question him about his action, he gave an
answer that still makes Keralites laugh. "I have installed only the Ezhava
Shiva," he said, a mockery of caste that undermined its rotten superstructure
more than his actual deed. Caste did not crumble immediately, however.
Sri Narayana Guru and many other reformers spent their lives campaigning
for more rights--more opportunity, the right to
enter and worship at all temples--for the various castes. But all the prosaic
struggle for civil rights went on in an atmosphere of spirituality; more
than the simple assertion of power by a group too large to be ignored,
it was also the assertion of a moral ideal, a view of human dignity against
the oppressions both of feudalism and of faith. "One caste, one religion,
one God for man," was Sri Narayana Guru's rallying cry. In the morning,
every road in Kerala is lined with boys and girls walking to school. Depending
on their school, their uniforms are bright blue, bright green, bright red.
It may be sentimental to say that their eyes are bright as well, but of
all the subtle corrosives that broke down the old order and gave rise to
the new Kerala, surely none is as important as the spread of education
to an extent unprecedented and as yet unmatched in the Third World.
Though
Christian missionaries and the British started the process, it took the
militance of the caste-reform groups and then of the budding left to spread
education widely. The first great boom was in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly
in southern Kerala, where the princes acceded to popular demands for ever
more schools. When leftists dominated politics in the1960s, they spread
the educational programs into Malabar, the northern state that had been
ruled directly by the British, and began granting scholarships to untouchables
and tribal peoples. By 1981, the general literacy rate in Kerala
was 70 percent--twice the all-India rate of 36 percent. Even more impressive,
the rural literacy rate was essentially identical, and female literacy,
at 66 percent, was not far behind. Kerala was a strange spike on the dismal
chart of Third World literacy.
The government,
particularly the leftists who governed for much of the late 1980s, continued
to press the issue, aiming for "total literacy," usually defined as a population
where about 95 percent can read and write. The pilot project began in the
Ernakulam region, an area of 3million people that includes the city of
Cochin. In late 1988, 50,000 volunteers fanned out around the district,
tracking down 175,000 illiterates between the ages of 5 and 60, two-thirds
of them women. The leftist People's Science Movement recruited 20,000 volunteer
tutors and sent them out to teach. Within a year, it was hoped, the illiterates
would read Malayalam at 30 words a minute, copy a text at 7 words a minute,
count and write from 1 to 100, and add and subtract three-digit numbers.
The larger goal was to make people feel powerful, feel involved; the early
lessons were organized around Brazilian teacher Paolo Freire's notion that
the concrete problems of people's lives provide the best teaching material.
"Classes were held in cowsheds, in the open air, in courtyards," one leader
told the New York Times. "For fishermen we went to the seashore. In the
hills, tribal groups sat on rocks. Leprosy patients were taught to hold
a pencil in stumps of hands with rubber bands. We have not left anyone
out." For those with poor eyesight, volunteers collected 50,000 donated
pairs of old eyeglasses and learned from doctors how to match them with
recipients. Of the 175,000 students, 135,000 scored 80 percent or better
on the final test, putting the region's official literacy rate above 96
percent; many of the others stayed in follow-up classes and probably had
learned enough to read bus signs. The total cost of the150 hours of education
was about $26 per person. Organizers knew the campaign was working when
letters from the newly literate began arriving in government offices, demanding
paved roads and hospitals.
M any
people, sincerely alarmed by the world's ever-expanding population, have
decided that we need laws to stop the growth, that, sad as such coercion
would be, it's a necessary step.And they have some cases to point to--China,
for instance, where massive government force probably did manage to contain
a population that would otherwise have grown beyond its ability to feed
itself. But as that country frees itself from the grip of the communists,
the pent-up demand for children may well touch off a massive baby
boom. Compulsion "does not work except in the very short term," writes
Paul Harrison in his book The Third Revolution (Viking Penguin, 1993),
and his case in point is India, which tried to raise its rate of sterilization
dramatically in the 1970s. To obtain recruits for the "vasectomy camps"
erected throughout the country, the government withheld licenses for shops
and vehicles, refused to grant food ration cards or supply canal
water for irrigation, and in some cases simply sent the police to round
up "volunteers." It worked, in a sense: In 1976, 8.3 million Indians were
sterilized. But Indira Gandhi lost the next election largely as a result,
the campaign was called off, and it was "ten years before the number of
couples using modern contraception rose again to their 1972-73 peaks,"
Harrison writes. India's population, which grew by 109 million in the 1960s
and 137 million in the 1970s, grew 160 million in the 1980s. That is the
population of two Mexicos, or one Eisenhower-era United States.
Kerala--and
a scattered collection of other spots around the world, now drawing new
attention in the wake of the United Nations' Cairo summit on population--makes
clear that coercion is unnecessary. In Kerala the birth rate is 40 percent
below that of India as a whole and almost 60 percent below the rate for
poor countries in general. In fact, a 1992 survey found that the
birth rate had fallen to replacement level. That is to say, Kerala has
solved one-third of the equation that drives environmental destruction
the world over. And, defying conventional wisdom, it has done so without
rapid economic growth--has done so without becoming a huge consumer of
resources and thus destroying the environment in other ways.
"The two-child
family is the social norm here now," said M.N. Sivaram, the Trivandrum--capital
of Kerala--representative of the International Family Planning Association,
as we sat in his office, surrounded by family-planning posters. "Even among
illiterate women we find it's true. When we send our surveyors out, people
are embarrassed to say if they have more than two kids. Seven or eight
years ago, the norm was three children and we thought we were doing pretty
good. Now it's two, and among the most educated people, it's one." Many
factors contribute to the new notion of what's proper. The pressure on
land is
intense, of course, and most people can't support huge families on their
small parcels. But that hasn't stopped others around the world. More powerful,
perhaps, has been the spread of education across Kerala. Literate women
are better able to take charge of their lives; the typical woman
marries at 22 in Kerala, compared to 18 in the rest of India. On average
around the world, women with at least an elementary education bear two
children fewer than uneducated women. What's more, they also want a good
education for their children. In many cases that means private schools
to supplement public education, and people can't afford several tuitions.
Kerala's
remarkable access to affordable health care has provided a similar double
blessing.There's a dispensary every few kilometers where IUDs and other
forms of birth control are freely available, and that helps. But the same
clinic provides cheap health care for children,and that helps even more.
With virtually all mothers taught to breast-feed, and a state-supported
nutrition program for pregnant and new mothers, infant mortality in 1991
was 17 per thousand, compared with 91 for low-income countries generally.
Someplace between those two figures--17 and 91--lies the point where people
become confident that their children will survive. The typical fertility
for traditional societies, says Harrison, is about seven children per woman,
which "represents not just indiscriminate breeding, but the result of careful
strategy." Women needed one or two sons to take care of them if they were
widowed, and where child mortality was high this meant having three sons
and, on average, six children. In a society where girls seem as useful
as boys, and where children die infrequently, reason suddenly dictates
one or two children. "I have one child, and I am depending on her to survive,"
said Mr. Sivaram. "If I ever became insecure about that, perhaps my views
would change."
Kerala's
attitude toward female children is an anomaly as well. Of 8,000 abortions
performed at one Bombay clinic in the early 1990s, 7,999 were female fetuses.
Girl children who are allowed to live are often given less food, less education,
and less health care, a bias not confined to India. In China, with its
fierce birth control, there were 113 boys for every 100 girls under the
age of 1 in 1990. There are, in short, millions and millions of women missing
around the world--women who would be there were it not for the dictates
of custom and economy. So it is a remarkable achievement in Kerala
to say simply this: There are more women than men. In India as a whole,
the 1991 census found that there were about 929 women per 1,000 men; in
Kerala, the number was 1,040 women, about where it should be. And the female
life expectancy in Kerala exceeds that of the male, just as it does in
the developed world.
Whatever
the historical reasons, this quartet of emancipations--from caste distinction,
religious hatred, the powerlessness of illiteracy, and the worst forms
of gender discrimination--has left the state with a distinctive feel, a
flavor of place that influences every aspect of its life. It is, for
one thing, an intensely political region: Early in the morning in tea shops
across Kerala, people eat a dosha and read one of the two or three
Malayalam-language papers that arrive on the first
bus. (Kerala has the highest newspaper-consumption per capita of any spot
in India.) In each town square political parties maintain their icons--a
statue of Indira Gandhi (the white streak in her hair carefully painted
in) or a portrait of Marx, Engels, and Lenin in careful profile. Strikes,
agitations, and "stirs," a sort of wildcat job action, are so common as
to be almost unnoticeable. One morning while I was there, the Indian Express
ran stories on a bus strike, a planned strike of medical students over
"unreasonable exam schedules," and a call from a leftist leader for the
government to take over a coat factory where striking workers had been
locked out. By the next day's paper the bus strike had ended, but a bank
strike had begun. Worse, the men who perform the traditional and much beloved
kathakali dance--a stylized ballet that can last all night--were threatening
to strike; they were planning a march in full costume and makeup through
the streets of the capital, Trivandrum.
Sometimes
all the disputation can be overwhelming. In a long account of his home
village,Thulavady, K.E. Verghese says that "politics are much in the air
and it is difficult to escape from them. Even elderly women who are not
interested are dragged into politics." After several fights, he reports,
a barbershop posted a sign on the wall: "No political discussions, please."
But for the most part the various campaigns and protests seem a sign of
self-confidence and political vitality, a vast improvement over the apathy,
powerlessness, ignorance, or tribalism that governs many Third World communities.
How can
the Kerala model spread to other places with different cultures, less benign
histories? Unfortunately, there's another question about the future that
needs to be answered first: Can the Kerala model survive even in Kerala,
or will it be remembered chiefly as an isolated and short-term outbreak
from a prison of poverty? In the paddy fields near Mitraniketan, bare-chested
men swung hoes hard into the newly harvested fields, preparing the ground
for the next crop. They worked steadily but without hurry--in part because
there was no next job to get to. Unemployment and underemployment
have been signal problems in Kerala for decades. As much as a quarter of
the state's population may be without jobs; in rural villages, by
many estimates, laborers are happy for 70 or 80 days a year of hoe and
sickle work. And though the liberal pension and unemployment compensation
laws, and the land reform that has left most people with at least a few
coconut trees in their house compound, buffer the worst effects of joblessness,
it is nonetheless a real problem: In mid-morning, in the small village
at the edge of the rice fields, young men lounge in doorways with nothing
to do.
To some
extent, successes are surely to blame. A recent report published by the
Centre for Development Studies looked at the coir (coconut fiber), cashew
processing, and cigarette industries and concluded that as unions
succeeded in raising wages and improving working conditions, they
were also driving factories off to more degraded parts of India. Kerala's
vaunted educational system may also play a role. Because of what they are
taught, writes M.A. Oommen, "university graduates become seekers
of jobs rather than creators of jobs." In Kerala, says K.K. George of the
Centre for Development Studies, "the concept of a job is a job in a ministry.
When you get out of school you think: `The state should give me a job as
a clerk'"--an understandable attitude, since government service is relatively
lucrative, completely secure, and over, by law, at age 55. Large numbers
of Keralites also go into medicine, law, and teaching. That they perform
well is proved by their success in finding jobs abroad--as many as a quarter
million Keralites work at times in the Persian Gulf--but at home there
is less demand.
The combination
of a stagnant economy and a strong commitment to providing health and education
have left the state with large budget deficits. Development expert Joseph
Collins, for all his praise of progress, calls it a "bloated social welfare
state without the economy to support it," a place that has developed a
"populist welfare culture, where all the parties are into promising more
goodies, which means more deficits. The mentality that things don't have
to be funded, that's strong in Kerala--in the midst of the fiscal crisis
that was going on while I was there, some of the parties were demanding
that the agricultural pension be doubled."
But the
left seems to be waking up to the problems. Professor Thomas Isaac--described
to me as a "24-karat Marxist" and as a wheel in the Communist Party--said,
"Our main effort has been to redistribute, not to manage, the economy.
But because we on the left have real power, we need to have an active interest
in that management--to formulate a new policy toward production." Instead
of building huge factories, or lowering wages to grab jobs from
elsewhere, or collectivizing farmers, the left has embarked on a series
of "new democratic initiatives" that come as close as anything on the planet
to actually incarnating "sustainable development," that buzzword beloved
of environmentalists. The left has proposed, and on a small scale has begun,
the People's Resource Mapping Program, an attempt to move beyond
word literacy to "land literacy." Residents of local villages have begun
assembling detailed
maps of
their area, showing topography, soil type, depth to the water table, and
depth to bedrock. Information in hand, local people could sit down and
see, for instance, where planting a grove of trees would prevent erosion.
And the mapmakers think about local human problems, too. In one village,
for instance, residents were spending scarce cash during the dry season
to buy vegetables imported from elsewhere in India. Paddy owners were asked
to lease their land free of charge between rice crops for market gardens,
which were sited by referring to the maps of soil types and the water table.
Twenty-five hundred otherwise unemployed youth tended the gardens, and
the vegetables were sold at the local market for less than the cost of
the imports. This is the direct opposite of a global market. It is exquisitely
local--it demands democracy, literacy, participation, cooperation. The
new vegetables represent "economic growth" of a sort that does much good
and no harm. The number of rupees consumed, and hence the liters of oil
spent packaging and shipping and advertising, go down, not up.
With high levels
of education and ingrained commitment to fairness, such novel strategies
might well solve Kerala's economic woes, especially since a stabilized
population means it doesn't need to sprint simply to stay in place. One
can imagine, easily, a state that manages to put more of its people to
work for livable if low wages. They would manufacture items that they need,
grow their own food, and participate in the world economy in a modest way,
exporting workers and some high-value foods like spices, and attracting
some tourists. "Instead of urbanization, ruralization," says K. Vishwanathan,
a longtime Gandhian activist who runs an orphanage and job-training
center where I spent several days. At his cooperative, near the silkworm
pods used to produce high-quality fabric, women learn to repair small motors
and transistor radios--to make things last, to build a small-scale economy
of permanence. "We don't need to become commercial agents, to always be
buying and selling this and that," says Vishwanathan. He talks on into
the evening, spinning a future at once humble and exceedingly pleasant,
much like the airy, tree-shaded community he has built on once-abandoned
land--a future as close to the one envisioned by E. F. Schumacher or Thomas
Jefferson or Gandhi as is currently imaginable. "What is the good life?"
asks Vishwanathan. "The good life is to be a good neighbor, to consider
your neighbor as yourself."
A small
parade of development experts has passed through Kerala in recent years,
mainly to see how its successes might be repeated in places like Vietnam
and Mozambique. But Kerala may be as significant a schoolhouse for
the rich world as for the poor. "Kerala is the one large human population
on earth that currently meets the sustainability criteria of simultaneous
small families and low consumption," says Will Alexander of the Food First
Institute in San Francisco.
Kerala suggests
a way out of two problems simultaneously--not only the classic development
goal of more food in bellies and more shoes on feet, but also the emerging,
equally essential task of living lightly on the earth, using fewer resources,
creating less waste. Kerala demonstrates that a low-level economy can create
a decent life, abundant in the things--health, education, community--that
are most necessary for us all. Gross national product is often used as
a synonym for achievement, but it is also an eloquent shorthand for gallons
of gasoline burned, stacks of garbage tossed out, quantities of timber
sawn into boards. One recent calculation showed that for every American
dollar or its equivalent spent anywhere on earth, half a liter of oil was
consumed in producing, packaging, and shipping the goods. One-seventieth
the income means one-seventieth the damage to the planet. So, on balance,
if Kerala and the United States manage to achieve the same physical quality
of life, Kerala is the vastly more successful society.
Which
is not to say that we could ever live on as little as they do--or, indeed,
that they should. The right point is clearly somewhere in between. Logical
as a middle way might be, though, we've not yet even begun to think about
it in any real terms. We've clung to the belief that perhaps someday
everyone on earth will be as rich as we are--a belief that seems utterly
deluded in light of our growing environmental awareness.
Kerala
does not tell us precisely how to remake the world. But it does shake up
our sense of what's obvious, and it offers a pair of messages to the First
World. One is that sharing works. Redistribution has made Kerala a decent
place to live, even without much economic growth. The second and even more
important lesson is that some of our fears about simpler living are unjustified.
It is not a choice between suburban America and dying at 35, between
agribusiness and starvation, between 150 channels of television and ignorance.It
is a subversive reality, that stagnant/stable economy that serves its people
well, and in some ways it is a scary one. Kerala implies that there is
a point where rich and poor might meet and share a decent life, and surely
it offers new data for a critical question of our age: How much is enough?
Excerpted from DoubleTake
by Bill McKibben