The invitation to write this piece on “the path on which the Republic should journey in the coming years” described the Constitution as “a remarkable visionary document that guarantees individual rights, social and economic justice, freedom of speech and expression, the right to practice one’s faith of choice, [and] protection of minority rights (linguistic, religious, ethnic, and gender).” I ask: Is there a secular democrat in India who is not deeply distressed by the current attacks on these basic principles of our Constitution, and by the human misery caused by the subversion of basic economic and political democracy? It is in this situation that the government of Kerala has dedicated itself not only to securing justice, liberty, and equality for all citizens, but also to giving life to the Directive Principles of the Constitution.
States are not subordinate entities but integral parts of the Union with their own legislative and executive powers (PTI)
Kerala got a land reform Act six days after the state’s first government came to office in 1957. The reform overturned the old relations of production in agriculture, changed forever the conditions of unfreedom of rural working people and laid the basis for further social and economic change. Kerala was the first state to establish, in the 1990s, universal school enrolment. In the last nine years, the state government has further strengthened public school infrastructure, including digital infrastructure, and worked to establish modern scientific syllabi at all levels.
There has been increased state plan investment in higher education. Kerala’s higher education policy has also been shaped to meet the felt needs and demands of its people, particularly its youth. Teacher training has been enhanced at every level, from primary to post-graduate education. The state government emphasises the inculcation of the scientific temper in school and university syllabi at a time when obscurantism has begun to overrun education at the Centre and in many states.
The Aardram Mission of the state government upgraded primary health centres to family health centres, while also ensuring public access to modern curative health facilities (including facilities for the treatment of non-communicable diseases) at all levels. Social provisioning in the form of public access to health, education, food, housing, and pensions, and policies to further the economic and social empowerment of women have been a hallmark of planned development policy in Kerala.
In a world where real wages are falling, and workers’ rights are being more and more circumscribed, Kerala stands out as a region where workers’ rights and wages are improving by the day. Kerala has the highest wage rates in India. In Kerala, the share of the state’s plan budget allocated to Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe development exceeds the proportion of these social groups in the population. Kerala’s implementation of the 73rd and 74th Amendments, and the establishment of a system of local government that represents grassroots democracy at work is well recognised in India and internationally -- 28% of the state’s plan budget is allocated to local governments as untied funds.
The effect of such public action is apparent in the fact that, per the Niti Aayog’s most recent multi-dimensional poverty index, the head-count ratio of multi-dimensional poverty in Kerala was 0.55%, the lowest among all states. In 2022-23, Kerala ranked first in rural per capita expenditure and fifth in urban per capita expenditure among all states. In November 2025, Kerala will be the first state of the Union to end extreme poverty.
The policy of the state government is to use current achievements in human development indicators as a springboard for further economic growth. Kerala has now been recognised as the top performer among states with respect to the most recent State Business Reforms Action Plan.
Kerala’s economic achievement will soon be equivalent to countries in the upper strata of middle-income economies, with one difference: in keeping with our ideals — and those of the freedom movement and Constitution — it will be a society in which not a single person is left behind.
The capacity of a state government to serve the people in the way envisaged by the Constitution depends on the health of federalism in the polity, and on the willingness of the Union government to heed the federal principle. After all, states are not subordinate entities but integral parts of the Union with their own legislative and executive powers.
In the fiscal realm, the Union government is increasingly spending on subjects in the State List, through centrally sponsored schemes (CSS) whose operational details are laid down by it. The states have to share the fiscal burden of implementing these one-size-fits-all schemes, often wholly inappropriate to the varied conditions prevailing in different states. The Union government is now also insisting on the undemocratic practice of “branding”; states, while paying 40% or more of the costs of CSS and undertaking the burden of implementation, are then forced to become propaganda vehicles of the ruling party at the Centre. During elections, the electorates of states are told that they will receive additional funds if they vote for the party that rules at the Centre, for a so-called “double-engine” government. Such practices are not only anti-federal but also utterly anti-democratic.
Increased spending by the Union on subjects in the State List affects the states adversely in three ways. First, the states are deprived of their constitutionally assigned space under Article 246. Secondly, a substantial share of the grants by the Union government to the states are becoming tied to the conditionalities of various CSS. Thirdly, as the Union government relies on increasing surcharges and cesses to finance these, states are deprived of their rightful share in the divisible pool of central taxes, an important source of untied fiscal transfers from the Centre to the states.
In the fiscal sphere, the insistence on uniform tax rates across the country without factoring in diversities in consumption patterns, and the imposition of standard borrowing limits across states without considering their vastly differing needs and fiscal capacities, seriously undermine the capacity of states to serve their people.
The task of establishing and protecting a truly sovereign, socialist, secular, and democratic society is as urgent today as at any time in our history. This is a task to be achieved not by governments alone, but by the efforts and struggles of our people and people’s movements.
Pinarayi Vijayan is the chief minister of Kerala. The views expressed are personal
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