Highlights
Kerala’s pandemic management has been a decisive test of the “Kerala model of development”.
Behind Kerala’s relative success were robust public institutions, the legacy of the “Kerala model” built over many years.
This pandemic shows that even a participatory social democratic state face tough challenge in managing crises and guaranteeing basic security.
The unhealthy combination of adversarial politics and consensus-based democratic approach led to the surge in Covid 19 infections in Kerala.
Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and Kudumbashree Poverty Alleviation Mission take a different approach to poverty alleviation. When viewed through the lens of capability approach the difference becomes more evident. Both the programmes, through their procedures and outputs, enable the beneficiaries themselves to be the agent of change. People themselves could utilize the opportunities generated by the procedural, output aspect of the programmes to remove their unfreedoms and deprivations to attain their desired functioning for well being. Community development also takes place along with individual development. The convergence of Mahatma Gandhi NREGS and Kudumbashree under the umbrella of the Local Self Government complement each other’s effort in poverty alleviation.
Attempts at measuring decentralisation are still in an underdeveloped stage. The reason for this lies in the failure to devise common standards against which measurement is possible and the lack of consensus about the very meaning of decentralisation. An attempt to measure decentralisation was made by Vengroff and Ben Salem in the context of Tunisia nearly a decade ago. An expanded and adapted version of this model is used to measure decentralisation in Kerala using the same judgmental criteria that they used after involving a panel of nine experts. These experts had a fairly good understanding of the practice of decentralisation to score on the basis of the adapted criteria. An ideal form of decentralisation envisaged in this measurement exercise is devolution. It has been found that on a scale ranging between 0 and 5, the state of Kerala obtained a score of 2.00 in spite of the fact that the investment that the state had made in decentralisation has no parallels anywhere in the developing countries. Such a low score, despite the much publicised campaign for decentralisation, was due to the focus on planning rather than on decentralisation issues. Attempts to measure decentralisation will not only enable us to develop more contextually valid measures of decentralisation, but also contribute to the clarification of the concept of decentralisation, particularly by identifying aspects neglected hitherto.
Intervention projects aimed at preventing STD and HIV generally tend to target women sex workers and through them their clients. This approach sees women sex workers as agents of change, with the attendant burden, but has failed to recognise gender issues surrounding sexual health, particularly power relations existing in society. While gender justice is a recognised legitimate concern, the discourse has excluded sex workers from its purview making them the moral 'other'. Sexual health projects implemented currently in different parts of Kerala are not sensitive to gender issues because they mistakenly assume that sex workers are autonomous subjects. In the sexual health project for female sex workers implemented in the Kottayam municipal area some gender issues were tackled with modest success. This paper makes a strong plea for more gender sensitivity in sexual health projects and for men to take their fair share of responsibility for HIV transmission.
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