1.1. CONTEXT

Over the past six decades, through the Five Year Plans, a number of projects have been implemented, aimed at balanced and sustainable development. Although during each plan, different development strategies were formulated and implemented neither did they reach the millions of the poor in the villages, in any significant manner, nor were the people able to reap the intended benefits. Consequently, not only economic disparity widened, but starvation, poverty and unemployment also increased. To remedy this, the governments both at the Centre and the state, implemented a large number of poverty eradication and employment generation projects and schemes. But since they were regarded, both by the governments and the people as nothing more than ‘giving and receiving of doles’, all of them ultimately did not reach the target. Despite the claims of the central and state governments that these initiatives succeeded in effecting some changes in the areas of poverty eradication and employment generation, in actual fact they failed in realizing the desired qualitative changes in the living standard of the citizens. This is acknowledged by both the governments and the polity. On the one hand, the rulers used the failures and loopholes in the formulation, legislation and implementation of these development strategies for advancing their vested interests; on the other hand, the people no less than the hostile influences at the local, national and global levels, failing to understand the radical societal transformation aimed at by these development programs and trying to reap immediate gains, contributed to the failure of these development schemes.

Similar are the underlying causes of the failure of development programs implemented in Kerala. Moreover, factors such as highest rate of unemployment in the country, particularly among the educated, lack of proper attitude to work, disintegrating agricultural sector, growing consumerism, economic dependency on the Gulf countries, increase in the number of people returning from the Gulf countries on account of loss of employment following the economic recession due to globalization, have created a great crisis for the state economy. The Kudumbasree Mission, set up with the objective of eradicating absolute poverty within 10 years, with its several initiatives has not reached anywhere near its goals and is extended indefinitely. The administrative crises that crop up now and then at the local as well as the state level have not only stalled the economic development of the State, but have aggravated the problems of unemployment, poverty and starvation of the masses.