K erala (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 percent 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 India--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.
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 the 1960s, 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 3 million 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. On February 4, 1990, 13
months after the initial canvass, Indian prime minister V.P. Singh marked the
start of World Literacy Year with a trip to Ernakulam, declaring it the
country's first totally literate district. 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 the 150
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.
W hatever 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.
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.
H ow 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?
Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature (Random House, 1989),
The Age of Mssing Information (Random House, 1992), and Hope, Human
and Wild (Little Brown, 1995).
Source: THE UTNE - a web
publication with some really good articles.
