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How Kerala got rich

Fifty years ago it was one of India’s poorest states, now it is now one of the richest. How did Kerala do it?

In a series of influential works, the Nobel-laureate Amartya Sen and his co-author the economist Jean Drèze praised Kerala’s development model for prioritising health and education, even with limited resources, and claimed that this pathway led to significant improvements in quality of life. Hundreds of thousands of people migrated to the Persian Gulf states like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Qatar to work in construction, retail and services, sectors that saw a massive investment boom following the two oil shocks of 1973 and 1979. The strengths include the generally high quality of life in small towns, improved youth aspirations often marked by an increased flow to foreign universities, better worker safety, the ability to attract skilled and unskilled migrants, unique natural-resource advantages and a degree of sociability in relations between castes and religions.

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