Kerala’s people’s plan campaign: key lessons and the road ahead

The People’s Campaign for Participatory Planning in Kerala is now widely recognised as one of the most enduring and successful experiments of its kind in the world. Highly touted participatory governance initiatives in different parts of the globe, including the famous Participatory Budgeting (PB) process in Porto Alegre, Brazil, have either been weakened or discontinued. Scholars identify multiple reasons for the success of the Kerala experiment, including the legacy of the broader democratic movement in the State, which the People’s Campaign sought to advance. In our view, too, the single most important reason for the success of people’s planning in the State has been the commitment to pursue democracy as an end in itself, notwithstanding its obvious instrumental value.

The foremost goal of the People’s Plan Campaign (PPC) in Kerala is to deepen democracy by empowering the Local Governments (LGs) and expanding the space for citizen’s participation in governance. Democracy is embraced as a goal in itself for its intrinsic value. This is not to say that democracy’s instrumental benefits are unimportant – there have been high expectations regarding the tangible gains that empowered LGs would deliver. But none of them have been valued more than the gains of making democracy more genuine and deeper. In hindsight, this ‘democracy first’ approach has paid rich dividends, functioning as an inbuilt and highly efficient mechanism for internal correction and rejuvenation of the State’s local governance system.

The prerogative of the people to choose between the competing elites to run the government cannot be ‘the be-all and end-all’ aim of democracy. The citizens in a democracy should have enough room for continuous engagement with the State and governance. The legacy of public action in Kerala is best seen in this light. The people of Kerala are not willing to leave their destiny to be made by the government or the market. They have evolved a mechanism of collective action to intervene in the market as well as in governance to assert their right to influence the process by which their collective destiny is made. They do not hesitate to act together decisively for the public good. Admittedly, democracy in Kerala has been a bit too noisy, thanks to the high density of public action.

Undoubtedly, the neo-liberal policies have affected the scope of public action significantly. The response of the people of Kerala, however, has not been one of despair, indecision and inaction. On the contrary, if anything, the commitment to collective action for the public good has only strengthened. It is as if the people wanted to compensate for the loss of democratic space caused by the neo-liberal turn. There are many new instances of public action, such as the renowned palliative network, wherein groups of individuals or communities come forward and launch highly influential collective experiments to augment the common good.

Participation fatigue

There is criticism that the people’s campaign has failed in sustaining the tempo of participation recorded during its initial phase. The observed ‘participation fatigue’ is attributed to several factors such as the excessive focus of the campaign on the problems of the below-poverty-line (BPL) population, the inability to include the middle and the upper-middle classes, cumbersome and bureaucratic procedures of local-level planning that alienate people, the ritualistic conduct of gramasabha meetings, the failure to address the real problems of the people, and the rescaling of social life from its local-centric nature to a national or even global orientation.

Nevertheless, there are a number of reasons to argue that participation should be seen in a much broader and dynamic sense than what can be gauged by the attendance at gramasabha meetings. The gramasabhas, as the statutory forums of all the voters in a ward, are entrusted with critical general tasks related to the formulation of local development plans and meet just for a few hours. They are not the right platforms to discuss specific problems confronting different sections of the people. Therefore, people tend to use specialised forums such as special gramasabhas for the farming households, families with persons with disabilities, senior citizens, palliative patients, etc. Such participatory avenues/activities report very high and continuous participation of people. Some of the special programmes such as Kudumbashree, Pallium Kerala, and Haritha Karmasena are already nationally and even globally renowned initiatives. They help add to the depth of democracy by including the hitherto marginalised, and at the same time, help the community by providing services which cannot be rendered efficiently through alternative means. Therefore, a study of participation, since it has become multidimensional in nature, requires a much more nuanced approach than counting the number of participants in the gramasabha meetings.

As it is widely noted, citizens’ apathy reflected in low and declining polling percentages has been a problem even in established democracies. Elections in Kerala, on the other hand, are known for commendably high popular enthusiasm as well as comparatively high polling percentages.

Bureaucratic capture and de-bureaucratisation

Critics of the PPC in Kerala have raised their accusing fingers against the plethora of guidelines and orders from above, especially those from the State government, that limit the freedom of operations of the LGs. The bureaucratic cobweb of regulations from above cannot be justified at all. In class-ridden societies, the promise of democracy would be under perpetual threat because of its vulnerability to elite capture. Kerala cannot claim to be an exception. The bureaucratic capture has turned out to be one of the critical debilitating afflictions of the Kerala experiment. Consequently, the State government decided to overhaul the methodology of planning to minimise the danger of elite capture.

Bureaucracy can alienate people and demean democracy in varied ways. As the LGs are the tier of government closest to the people, there have been many initiatives to improve the delivery of services by making the relevant processes transparent, efficient, quick and people-friendly. The ISO 9001:2015 certification of rural LGs in the State, introduced during the thirteenth plan (2017-22), deserves a special mention. ISO 9001:2015 certificates are granted after fulfilling several stringent quality standards defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The ISO quality standards cover a wide range of services and clearly defined norms to be achieved with respect to each of them. It presupposes major improvement in the office infrastructure, facilities in the front office, connectivity, maintenance and management of records, file management system, role clarity, citizen charter, procedure manual, quality manual, employee training, quality objectives, internal audit, surveillance audit, etc. The ISO certification is granted for three years but a surveillance audit is conducted every year to ensure the sustainability of quality standards. Over a period of five years, all the Village, Block and District Panchayats in the State received ISO certification.

Added to this is the introduction of the K-SMART programme, which is hailed as a model e-governance initiative. In fact, for a wide range of services, the citizens need not even visit the LG office now. For instance, certificates such as those related to marriage, birth or death can be downloaded from the LG website after submitting online the required information. The LG offices undoubtedly have become much more democratic than in the past by limiting the space of bureaucratic discretion and making the system transparent, quick and efficient and hence non-discriminatory to the citizens. The social standing of the citizen does not matter in accessing the services that are provided online. The modernisation of LG offices illustrates how even the seemingly trivial aspects of governance play a very important role in deciding the genuineness of democracy.

The methodology of planning from below

Annual budgets and annual development plans have the potential to be very effective instruments of democratisation. Preparation as well as implementation of the budget and the plan can be made transparent besides involving people in a big way in both processes. Participation in formulation and implementation of the budget and the plan would give the citizens a critical role in the use of public resources; in setting the priorities and ensuring that the resources are used for the priorities set, while also minimising leakage. Although the people’s planning campaign was designed to achieve the above goals, bureaucratic capture has rendered them almost impossible.

A widely debated sign of bureaucratic capture was the undue delay in the process of plan formulation. The fact that it typically took six to seven months for plan formulation, leaving hardly five to six months for implementation, rendered the planning process meaningless. The annual plan was supposed to be ready well before the beginning of the financial year. After all, the main purpose of planning was to see ahead and act as early and timely as possible. The delay was caused by the highly complicated and heavily bureaucratised methodology of plan formulation and approval.

The consequence of the delay in plan approval was multidimensional; it resulted in the clustering of development activities and payments in the terminal months of the year; leakages and corruption on account of the heavy rush for achieving expenditure targets; obvious quality compromises; mismatch between the calendar of economic activities (farming calendar for instance) and the working of the local plan; inability to integrate the plan and the budget; the loss of citizens’ confidence in the system, etc.

In response, the methodology of local planning had to be overhauled. The new methodology helped avoid delays in the process of formulation and approval of annual plans. From 2018-19 onwards, almost all LGs in the State could get their annual plans ready and approved before the commencement of the financial year, leaving one full year for implementation. It also facilitated the integration of the annual plan and annual budget of the LGs, a long-pending suggestion for improving local governance in the State. Moreover, once the long delay in plan formulation and implementation was avoided, LG intervention in local development became a year-round organic process. The problem of bunching up of development work and expenditure in the terminal months was exemplarily resolved.

Knowledge content of local plans

LGs in the State have come up with widely emulated innovative ideas. But there is a tendency to follow stereotypes. There is an obvious need to tap the human resources available in the region to improve the knowledge content of local development plans. Local experts as well as educational and technical institutions can play a very important role in improving the quality of projects and the development plans in general. They can help the LGs by studying local development problems, gathering and analysing relevant data and suggesting different possible solutions, besides preparing detailed project proposals. Needless to say, the sources of local and traditional knowledge should also be tapped.

The goal that every locality should evolve a healthy culture of ‘collective imagining of future development’ is far from achieved. Ideally, the LGs should have a shelf of projects from which the projects for the annual plan are chosen. The shelf of projects and the vision of local development should be subjects of continuous public discussion in the locality. An important task for the future should be to build bridges between LGs and the knowledge institutions. This will also be of immense help to the centres of knowledge because the search for knowledge is ideally rooted in the concrete world of praxis. A related development is the introduction of a ‘Special Window for Innovative Programmes’ for facilitating schemes that are innovative and relevant but cannot be taken up by the LGs as per the existing guidelines. A District Level Expert Committee chaired by the Collector was constituted to examine and approve such projects.

District plans and spatial planning

Public intervention in a particular sector or locale cannot be seen in isolation; it will have implications for multiple locales and sectors and vice versa. Such overlaps and externalities call for vertical and horizontal integration of government interventions undertaken by different agencies at different levels. At the local level, the lowest tier of government, i.e., the Grama Panchayats in rural areas and the Municipalities or the City Corporations in urban areas, are best suited for overseeing such integration. The Constitution of India entrusts the responsibility for such integration at the district level to the District Planning Committee (DPC). The Constitution (Article 243 ZD) envisages the DPC formulating a district plan to be used as an instrument for integrating development activities, especially government interventions in the region. However, apart from the early experiments in selected districts, there has been hardly any systematic attempt to prepare district plans in the country.

Kerala made history during the thirteenth plan not only by preparing district plans in all the districts but also by making serious attempts towards integrating development projects undertaken by the LGs and the line departments. The exercise revealed the immense scope and potential gains of integration. The district plans revealed the scope for minimising duplication of efforts as well as the need to put in collective and coordinated efforts to address development problems. The district plans brought forth several ideas for combined projects to be undertaken together by the LGs and the line departments. The spatiality of development has never been a major point of discussion in the State, let alone the question of incorporating it in policy formulation. The growth of urbanisation, increasing intensity of urban problems, recurrence of extreme weather events, and frequent disasters make spatial planning unavoidable in the future scheme of things.

The urban challenge

Kerala is one of the fastest urbanising States in India. However, the higher level of urbanisation already reached and the increasing pace of urban growth in recent years have hardly informed development policymaking in the State. For instance, the policy on LGs, including the methodology of local level planning, did not make any distinction between rural and urban LGs. It was in the thirteenth five-year plan that a beginning was made by issuing a different set of plan guidelines for the urban LGs. It is no exaggeration that the State was caught completely unawares by the worsening problems of urbanisation.

The worst consequence of the policy indifference is seen in the area of waste disposal and sanitation. Until recently, urban areas in Kerala lacked a well-defined system of collection and disposal of different types of waste: liquid, solid, bio-degradable, plastic, electronic, medical, etc. The ‘Haritha Karmasena’, comprising women workers engaged in collection and disposal of waste, has raised expectations. It has helped many LGs evolve a fairly sound mechanism of collection, processing, and disposal of waste.

Nonetheless, urban problems such as displacement and alienation of the poorer citizens, air and water pollution, poor drainage, accumulation of waste, flash floods, infrastructure bottlenecks, traffic congestion, absence of parking space, and shortages of common facilities such as playgrounds and parks, etc,. would continue to be a major preoccupation of development planners in the State. Urban development will have to be given a preeminent position in future planning. The recently submitted Urban Commission Report and the promised urban policy would help make another Kerala Model in the area of urban development.

Long-term planning

In the absence of long-term planning or perspective planning, planning tends to become an excuse for an ad hoc approach to development. This, in fact, is one of the threats confronting LG plans in Kerala. Local level planning in Kerala, despite the best efforts made in the past, has not been able to go beyond the preparation of annual plans. In the absence of long-term planning, it is difficult to plan multi-year projects, and hence LGs tend to make small projects which can be implemented in a year. There are many areas that require larger projects with multi-year resource commitments and longer implementation schedules. Even though the five-year plan is an integral part of the methodology of planning originally envisaged for people’s planning, it proved to be an elusive goal because of the heavy burden of procedures related to the preparation of annual plans. The LGs were perennially preoccupied with either the preparation or belated implementation of annual plans. If five-year plans are too demanding, LGs should be encouraged to develop long-term perspectives on development besides taking up bigger and multi-year development programmes.

Services and infrastructure

Democratic decentralisation in the State is widely acknowledged to have produced commendable outcomes in the areas of services and infrastructure. The LG intervention began making a difference in these sectors from the very start of the people’s campaign in 1996. Services and infrastructure witnessed a relatively high level of devolution of functions, functionaries, and institutions to the lower-tier governments. For instance, primary health, school education, district- and local-level social welfare institutions, and local and intra-district roads were almost fully transferred to the LGs. The devolution of resources, transfer of institutions, enthusiasm of elected local leaders, competition among them, and, above all, people’s participation resulted in both quantitative and qualitative improvements in local infrastructure and service delivery. Owing to popular demand, the LGs have always been keen to accord top priority—and hence maximum resources—to local roads and buildings. The same holds true for public services and welfare activities. It is this bias in favour of infrastructure and services that prompted the State government to prescribe upper limits for plan allocations in these sectors. This measure was necessary to ensure a reasonable level of allocation for the goods-producing sectors.

The thirteenth plan period is marked by several major State-level initiatives to coordinate and guide LG activities in public services such as education, public health, sanitation, and housing. To address these sectors, four Missions were launched, each entrusted with complementary roles focused mainly on functions best handled at higher levels of governance – such as providing knowledge, technology, and design inputs; mobilising additional resources, including institutional credit; training and extension; and ensuring inter-agency coordination. Although there were valid criticisms, such as the risk of recentralisation (or reversal of decentralisation), the Missions as a whole helped to consolidate the gains of the Kerala model of development in education, health, and the overall quality of life.

A few key developments during this period merit mention. The decline in enrolment in government and government-aided schools has reversed, with publicly funded schools regaining students owing to comprehensive academic and infrastructural improvements. Education and healthcare in public institutions remain completely free. Primary and community health centres improved markedly in infrastructure, staffing, and service quality, reflected in higher inpatient and outpatient numbers. Though these declined briefly in 2020 due to the pandemic, studies show that the strengthened public health system helped Kerala overcome COVID-19. The LIFE Mission aims at providing housing for all homeless families, with the number of houses built and transferred to the beneficiaries nearing the five-lakh mark. The Harita Keralam Mission focuses on the environment and waste management, with about 10% of Kerala’s 87,000 km of streams rejuvenated and several small rivers revived.

Elimination of extreme poverty

A closely related achievement that carries forward the legacy of the Kerala model of development is the elimination of extreme poverty in the State. Households suffering from extreme poverty were identified, and micro-plans were prepared and implemented with surgical precision to help them overcome deprivation. The State has been officially declared free from extreme poverty on November 1, 2025. However, new households may still fall into this trap, making it essential to sustain efforts against deprivation, poverty, and hunger until such social ailments are fully eradicated.

Inability to build livelihood opportunities

A major and widely acknowledged disappointment of the people’s planning experiment has been its inability to create much-needed livelihood opportunities. The laudable performance of the LGs in infrastructure and services loses much of its sheen when the poor performance of the goods-producing sectors is considered.

The performance gap is commonly applicable to industry as well as agriculture.

There are many structural reasons that limit the scope of LG interventions in the goods-producing sectors that might have to compete and survive in markets which are deeply integrated with national and international markets where LGs have no control whatsoever. In such markets, the rules of the game are all set at higher levels of government or at the level of supra-national agencies, so that LGs can only hope to make the best of these externally determined rules. But the LGs cannot be indifferent to the challenge of livelihood creation. LG interventions should be sensitive to the real challenges of unfettered competition in the markets for industrial and agricultural products. In meeting such challenges, the LGs will require the support of higher tiers of government, which are best suited to deal with problems extending beyond local boundaries.

The thirteenth plan period witnessed some important LG initiatives in addressing the livelihood problem, especially in agriculture and allied sectors. The new initiatives were based on the findings of studies and discussions on the LG failure in the agriculture and allied sectors. The social relations of production in agriculture alienated land, labour, and capital from farming. On account of speculative investment, the asset function of land gained supremacy over its production function. Those who wanted to cultivate, or the real farmers, lost land; but those who gained more land preferred to leave it fallow. They held on to land expecting appreciation of land prices and shied away from cultivation because of the uncertainties associated with small-scale farming. The LGs, in response, encouraged lease land farming by extending farming subsidies to the lease cultivators. Efforts were also made to bring fallow land back to cultivation. Further, the LG subsidy norms were relaxed to extend farm subsidies to the above poverty line (APL) farmers. Major efforts were also undertaken to encourage farm mechanisation to address the problem of labour shortage. Many initiatives in the area of marketing were launched by the LGs, the cooperatives, as well as the State government. The paddy procurement programme of the State government at remunerative prices played a major role in promoting paddy production. The thirteenth plan period witnessed a major shift in the pattern of growth in agriculture and allied sectors. For instance, the historic trend of continuous decline in the area of cultivation and production of paddy witnessed a turnaround.

The LGs in Kerala do not have anything substantial to report in the area of industries. The local plans have extended support for self-employment programmes. In some other cases, LGs have come forward supporting micro enterprises. However, mortality rates among such units promoted by LGs have been quite high. The critical minimum support that such units require could not be provided by the LGs. The LG-supported entrepreneurs fail when exposed to the heat of competition from established players. An effective model programme for supporting industrial units is yet to emerge.

The mindset that the government’s business is not to promote private entrepreneurship is well-entrenched in the State. Given the kind of disadvantage that the small local firms encounter in the highly distorted markets, it is important to review the old mindset. It should ultimately lead to governmental programmes that support and guide the local entrepreneurs in the hostile environment of unequal competition in the conspicuously distorted markets. The new entrepreneurship programme initiated by the industries department, which works in collaboration with the LGs, is a promising initiative that might change the scenario.

Institutional innovation

Studies on success stories have invariably identified the role of either the elected leaders or the government officers leading the effort in making such accomplishments possible. The role of exemplary individuals or a team of individuals raises the question of continuity and sustainability of such successful experiments. In fact, there are instances of celebrated success stories waning when the leadership changes hands. It underlines the need for institutionalisation of successful models. ISO certification of LG offices is a good example of institutionalisation of model experiments in office management and governance. Kudumbashree Mission is an important institution innovated to sustain women empowerment and poverty alleviation interventions in the State, especially at the local level. The same applies to the network of palliative societies in Kerala.

The issue of sustainability of successful experiments assumes more importance in the context of interventions on the livelihood front. Successful models more often than not involve different forms of collectives of small producers that compensate for the unequal competition that the petty producers encounter in the markets for agricultural and manufactured products. Such collectives as the Padasekharasamitis (Paddy field farmers’ associations), different types of cooperative institutions, other registered societies, farmer producer companies, etc., deserve support from LGs as well as higher tiers of government. However, there exists considerable confusion regarding the kind of support that the LGs can give to such institutions, let alone the question of long-term commitment of support. Obviously, in many such areas, LGs will require the help of institutional mechanisms for successful intervention over a fairly long period. There is an urgent need to have a policy position on the LG support for such institutional arrangements.

Democratic decentralisation in Kerala should be seen as a work-in-progress experiment in deepening democracy. Ownership and active involvement of the people are the guarantees that it would be subjected to continuous popular scrutiny, rectification, and improvisation. The history of public action in the State, which had played a leading role in the making of the modern Kerala society, is perhaps the biggest source of inspiration that sustains the movement, as it scales new heights.

(Prof. K.N. Harilal is Chairman of the Seventh State Finance Commission, a former member of the Kerala State Planning Board, and a former Professor at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram)

This article is part of The Hindu e-book. Kerala: a model State’s paradox