Abstract
This paper is an extended review article to discuss the currently fashionable opinion among the neoliberal scholars as well as influential policy makers and advisers that the ‘Gujarat Model’ of growth is something that ought to be emulated by the rest of India in its quest for rapid economic transformation. A close and careful reading of the articles included in the volume brings out both the exclusionary and inequalizing nature of otherwise high overall economic growth in Gujarat and its less than admirable performance in human and social development indicators. Gujarat is not one of the worst performing states in India either by growth, poverty reduction or social or human development. But certainly it is not in the top league in any of these except aggregate economic growth. By a careful comparison of Gujarat and Kerala the paper also seeks to demolish the claim made by Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya that Gujarat has outperformed in Kerala not only in growth but also in social sector development.
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Notes
What Bhagwati and Panagariya considered Kerala’s literacy in 1951 and Maharashtra’s literacy in 1971 as comparable to Gujarat’s 1981 literacy. This arbitrarily assigns Gujarat a 30-year advantage over Kerala and a 20-year advantage over Maharashtra for purposes of comparison.
Studies on remittances indicate that the percentage of households receiving remittances does not exceed one-fifth at any given year.
Kerala reached its replacement fertility rate (i.e. Total Fertility Rate of 2.1) by 1990. During 2001 and 2011, Kerala’s population growth rate per annum was a mere 0.49 per cent compared to Gujarat 1.92.
By 1981, Kerala’s literacy rate was 79, close to the UNESCO’s definition of ‘Universal literacy’ of 80 per cent.
This means those with a secondary school level pass plus those with a higher secondary with or without other educational qualifications such as diploma but not graduation plus those with graduate level of education or above.
The lower share of young men in the educated category could be partly due to a greater out-migration of educated men for employment outside Kerala, especially to the Gulf countries as well as to other parts of India especially in the emerging ‘knowledge economy’. Since the statistics are based on domicile status of persons, it is quite possible that Gujarat has a net in-migration of educated men from other parts of the country but this point gets weakened when we find that Gujarat had a higher share of educated ST and SC than Kerala in the 1980s and 1990s respectively.
Literacy in the Indian context is defined as ability to write one’s name and read a sentence or two.
The author of this ‘White Revolution’ is Verghese Kurien, a Keralite, who worked with Tribhuvandas Kishibhai Patel, a Gujarati freedom fighter and a leader of cooperative movement in Anand, Kheda district of Gujarat who transformed what was then a local Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers Union as the spring board for building up the largest milk producers’ cooperative in the world. This is also known as the Amul Model.
References
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This paper is an analysis of the Indira Hirway, Amita Shah and Ghanshyam Shah (eds.), Growth or Development: Which Way Is Gujarat Going? New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2014, 608 pp.
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Kannan, K.P. Growth without inclusion: the Gujarat ‘model’ for India’s development exposed. Ind. J. Labour Econ. 58, 653–676 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-016-0043-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41027-016-0043-2