Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan (left) and Governor Arif Mohammad Khan. (Image source: Twitter/@KeralaGovernor/File)
A few weeks ago, Kerala governor Arif Mohammed Khan and chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan were at loggerheads. Khan was furious about the Kerala government appointing political cadres as personal staff for ministers and doling out pensions for them. He was also worried about the lack of quality in 'party-recommended vice-chancellors' in universities. And during October and November, the Left Democratic Front (LDF) government even paid Rs 85 lakh to senior lawyers looking for options to 'fight Governor legally.' And there were even doubts about whether Khan would come to the assembly and read out the customary address.
But on January 23, the governor came to the assembly. He looked calm and dutiful while reading the customary public address. He read out the 49-page-long policy address without skipping a single line, unlike what RN Ravi, the Tamil Nadu governor, did in the Tamil Nadu assembly. On January 9, the Tamil Nadu governor skipped a few lines and walked out. But here in Kerala, Khan never looked bored when he had to read out ‘My Government’ 72 times with a sincere tone in his address. However, a critical read of the document will reveal that it is hollow and has half-baked truths.
On page 1, the governor says he is happy to note that Kerala has achieved remarkable economic growth, 12 percent at constant prices and 17 percent at current prices. In 2020-21, the Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP) had contracted by 8.43 percent at constant prices and 5.43 percent at current prices. In 2021-22, the GSDP expanded around 12 percent at constant prices and 17 percent at current prices. Highlighting 12 percent growth by Khan, was a repetition of what the Left sympathisers have been parroting when critics point at the state's ballooning debt.
Interestingly, when the Kerala government chest-thumps on higher GSDP to confirm economic growth, Simon Kuznets, 1971 Economics Nobel Laureate, and the GDP inventor, was clear that his measure had nothing to do with the well-being of people. But we confuse the two. GDP is not a measure of “wealth and well-being” at all. It is a measure of income. It is a backward-looking “flow” measure that tells you the value of goods and services produced in a given period in the past.
Viewed from this perspective and if we agree with the governor’s address that Kerala has achieved stellar economic growth, subsequent paragraphs of his speech contradict this. The Governor says that his government undertook a survey to identify extreme poverty in early 2022, which identified 64,006 extremely poor families across Kerala. And in another paragraph, the governor says that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme continues to provide succour to jobless families driven by poverty in Kerala. He adds that as of January 18, 2023, the scheme has generated 7.24 crore person days of employment, providing support to 14.85 lakh families. In other words, around 15 lakh families in Kerala survive on a rural employment guarantee scheme where the one-day wage is Rs 311. However, the governor says in his address that poverty in Kerala is only 0.7 percent, the lowest in the country.
Interestingly, the poverty rate is calculated using the multidimensional poverty index (MPI) developed by the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the United Nations Development Programme. NITI Aayog is also using MPI to measure poverty. The indices of MPI are health, education, and standard of living. In Kerala, public health, public education, and standard of living are high when compared to other states, due to sustained public investments over the years. So, there is not much of a surprise that Kerala's poverty is the lowest in India as per MPI calculations.
And about ways to address unemployment, the governor said that his government has initiated a massive programme, the Kerala Knowledge Economy Mission, to create 20 lakh jobs in the economy within the next five years. This claim was made by former Kerala finance minister Thomas Issac in 2021 January.
Wittingly, Khan, who is 'seen' as an RSS agent by many in the Left government, was forced to take a dig at the central government in the address. He had to read that "recent measures to curtail the borrowing limits of the states constrain the scope of their interventions in the health, education, and infrastructure sectors. While fiscal discipline has to be enforced in earnest, there cannot be different yardsticks for state governments, which do not apply to the central government. The state government had always raised concerns that the central government was squeezing Kerala by capping borrowing limits.
In the concluding paragraph, the governor read that a positive approach from the central government will foster meaningful cooperative federalism.
In 2022 October, Khan said that Kerala finance minister KN Balagopal had lost his pleasure. He was displeased with the Kerala government then. But now, when he reads out the public address without any displeasure and expresses his government's unhappiness with the central government, it looks like the Left government has his pleasure now. In short, the public address sounded like a manifesto of the ruling LDF government. It was repetitive and didn't have ideas on a way forward.
Rejimon Kuttappan is an independent journalist and author of Undocumented-Penguin 2021. Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.
