Meen curry and rice

Meen curry and rice

The prime minister's sojourn in the sylvan backwaters of God's Own Country may have temporarily raised the price of fish in the region -- because securitywallahs shooed away the fishermen of Vembanadu kayal -- but that's a small price to pay for being able to figure at long last on the national radar screen. The trouble is that Dilli is for ever door ast, and the view from the Capital is invariably out of sync with life as it is being lived in the distant reaches of the country. Inevitably, given its location, it is the politics of northern India that tends to dominate New Delhi's preoccupations and, by extension, that of the country. A peripatetic prime minister, albeit one on holiday, is therefore good news because it means that not just the man, but the Prime Minister's Office as an institution, is sensitised to the specific problems of a particular region.

Kerala certainly has its share of them. The state may have been selling itself as God's Own Country over the last decade and its model of development may have been lauded internationally thanks to the work of philosopher economists like Dr Amartya Sen, but today it finds itself severely strapped, thanks to declining agricultural incomes, an almost non-existent industrial base and an ever-growing army of unemployed youth. The economic base of the state can hardly be termed as a stable one, desperately dependent as it is on Gulf remittances and the tourist dollar, both of which are notoriously uncertain. The high rate of suicides in this seeming paradise is indicative of a serious social crisis and one that demands the urgent attention of the nation. In fact, the man who had long been extolling the virtues of the Kerala Model, Sen himself, was recently constrained to point out that the state would need to do some serious reorientation in its development strategies if it is not to be increasingly left out of therunning in terms of growth and general progress. His prescription that Kerala make committed investments in higher education and the information technology sector was therefore timely, even if the state's political leaders seemed to be impatient about being lectured at.

This being the case, it is just as well that Vajpayee, between boat rides in the `Vaikundam' and displays of kalaripayattu, found time to listen to the state's chief minister and announce an economic package for the state. This is to be welcomed but with the cautionary observation that the value of such a ``shotgun package'' would lie in a long-term commitment to the problems it seeks to address, such as improving the trade and transportation infrastructure of the coastal state and redressal mechanisms forchronically ailing sectors of agriculture, like cocounut farming. What is relevant in the package announced, especially in the light of Sen's observations, is the emphasis on development of software and IT-enabled services. The backwaters are idyllic, no doubt about that, but getting stuck as a backwater economy is not.