Continued Learnings from my US State Department Professional Exchange - A different take on the Kerala model

I have returned to Delhi from my four-day stay in Kochi, but this entry will continue to focus on what I learned in Kochi. I will speak to the perspectives and insights that I gathered from my meetings with Chairman Balagopal Chandrasekar, leader of the Kerala State Industrial Development Corporation and Dr. Rajan Chedambath, Director of the Centre for Heritage, Environment and Development. Interestingly, my main take-aways from the meetings with the aforementioned expert officials align with a book that I have been reading during the trip, authored by Professor Robin Hambleton and titled Leading the Inclusive City - Place-Based Innovation for a Bounded Planet, which I’ll explain further towards the end of this blog. 

In my last entry, I heralded the “Kerala project” as a model worth emulating. And while I am certainly not ready to discount its successes, I do want to inject some healthy questioning as suggested to me by Dr. Chedambath, who wisely said to me something along the lines of, “You must be critical and question the model given the state of Kochi today.” When he said this, I cited the statistics that I had read about high literacy, health indicators, education and low poverty. He acknowledged all of these accomplishments, but then asked me, “if Kerala is a model to be recognized around the world, then why is our water not potable, why do people feel a need to leave and work elsewhere, why are our sidewalks in such a bad state?” He also brought up the fact that Kerala is blessed with abundant natural resources - including a major port, fertile soil, rich in spices, etc., which should position it for even greater prosperity than it is seeing today. He made clear to me that he feels the people and government of Kerala appear to be resting on their laurels more than they should. Perhaps the Kerala model was an innovative catalyst for the region’s successes, but he insisted that there is a need to build upon such successes with increased investments in public space and services, and infrastructure. He also argued that there has not been enough innovation to make Kochi more of a hub for jobs, which would compel residents to stay. His perspective is convincing and also well aligned with the work that he leads running the Centre for Heritage, Environment and Development (C-HED) - a semi-autonomous organization, chaired by the mayor - that was established in 2002 by the Kochi Municipal Government Corporation to serve as a research and development wing for the municipality. Its core services are:

• Transformative support (visioning, policy change, public space and culture)

• Resource mobilization (often from international sources)

• Knowledge generation (think tank, best practices)

• Communication and outreach (citizen engagement)

The C-HED manages six cultural/heritage institutions, initiates projects focused on sustainability, supports planning processes, researches global best practices, and advocates for innovative government policies and practices. I found it to be an excellent complement to the municipal government, because through its work, Dr. Chedambath and his team play a key role in ensuring participatory governance and co-creation of solutions relevant to Kochi’s challenges, long-term planning and investments in the public domain, and innovative approaches that break with the ubiquitous challenges of siloed government bureaucracy. Indeed, C-HED, with its extremely lean staff of 20 FTEs, is a tremendous value-add for the local government. And yet, Dr. Chedambath made clear, local government is significantly under-resourced and needs to be reimagined. 

Interestingly, Chairman Balagopal Chandrasekar, leader of the Kerala State Industrial Development Corporation (KSIDC) told me the same exact thing about the need to grow a much more robust local government and also cautioned me against believing all the statistics I had read and suggested I read the following book: Whole Numbers, Half Truths by Rukmini S (I found a video on it and posted it here). When I told him about my background working for municipal government for eight years, he lamented that he hadn’t known sooner that I was coming as he would have had me prepare a presentation on local government for university students! I dug into the topic with him for about an hour at his lovely apartment, where he and his beautiful wife, Vinita, hosted me. He explained that he had worked as an official in the national government for many years and that he recently assumed the chairmanship of the KSIDC, a state-wide agency that promotes Kerala for investment and export, offers incentives, identifies key economic sectors to grow and invest in, manages industrial parks, supports ease of doing business, among other activities. Notably, KSIDC has a strong environmental and social justice focus. It prominently features its social indicators as part of its promotional strategy for business investment and a number of its incentives are focused on promoting increased equity and environmental sustainability: subsidies for hiring local, women and transgender employees or for manufacturing leases; land purchases by women or transgender entrepreneurs; as well as for businesses utilizing renewable energy. While KSIDC seems to do some great work and apply an integrated approach of business attraction, retention and human development, Chairman Balagopal insisted it isn’t enough to manage such activities at the state level without a strong local government.

And that brings me to Hambleton’s Leading the Inclusive City. In his book, Hambleton stresses the need for strong local government and leadership and lays out a series of approaches. He makes an appeal for moving from governance in the form of “city boss” to “facilitative leader orchestrating the efforts of many actors” and states that radical public service requires innovation and co-creation, not just improvement of the status quo. This stance is essentially that of Chairman Balagopal and Dr. Rajan Chedambath, who argue that the Kerala model needs to be revamped and improved upon through the co-creation of a new model of local government, rather than by incrementally improving what exists. 

Hambleton also shares that a recent analysis of how to reduce poverty in the global south showed that two factors are important: 1.) the extent to which the poor are organized; 2.) the nature of their relationship with local government. He insists that one of the major causes of today’s inequities is that we’ve moved as a society from being a market economy to a market society, crowding out important values like solidarity, caring for others, and nurturing the natural environment. Dr. Rajan similarly lamented that residents of Kochi have contributed to the poor conditions of the waterways, roads and public spaces due to an aversion to sacrificing for the greater good and prioritizing long-term sustainability. C-HED has tried to address this challenge by fostering community education and engagement to promote environmental sustainability, stakeholder-centered city-building, and corporate social responsibility. 

To conclude, the Kerala model helped to establish a strong foundation by investing in human potential and basic needs, but there hasn’t been a strong enough emphasis on investing in place - neither at the man-made, economic nor environmental level. Due to their educational level, residents have access to numerous economic opportunities in other countries and many choose to pursue such opportunities. In order to make the investments needed in place ( infrastructure, targeted industry initiatives, beautiful and public spaces and amenities) to make Kochi more attractive, both Rajan and Balagoapal feel strongly that a much more robust local government is needed than exists today. The State will never be able to replace the ability of the city to provide the customized investments and localized attention needed, yet the national and state government can make this possible by providing more dedicated resources and empowering local governments to utilize financial revenue-generating models, such as bonding. I’ll end with Hambleton’s definition of an inclusive city which encapsulates nicely what I learned from Chairman Balagopal Chandrasekar and Dr. Rajan Chedambath.

“The inclusive city is governed by powerful, place-based democratic institutions. All residents are able to participate fully in the society and in the economy and civic leaders strive for just results while caring for the natural environment on which we all depend.”