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Comment by jeswin | Hacker News Reader

Yep. I lived there for the first two decades, and outside Kerala for the next two and a bit. The only thing Kerala exports is the workforce, since it's impossible to start anything in Kerala thanks to politics and high costs. I know because I've tried. Kerala had historical ties with the Middle East thanks in part to a substantial Muslim population, and the migrant labour force was able to funnel some of Middle Eastern prosperity during the oil boom years back into the state. That is in a nutshell, Kerala's economic story.

Speaking of the left, I remember being next to a protest circa 1990 against ... computers!

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It's not clear what you tried to start and absent any other information your personal failure at it isn't a compelling alternative picture of the region's development to me.

I'm sure there are valid other views than the one presented in the article, I'm not saying there aren't. But as someone who doesn't know much about the region, you aren't really giving me more information about it, or giving me any reasons to take your view more seriously than the one presented in the article.

You can completely ignore what I said about my personal experience. The rest of it is still valid, and please read the child comment I posted on the same sub-thread.

Basically, Kerala exports a workforce because it can't produce or export anything else. At roughly a third of the GDP (in 2012 according to Wikipedia), it's a remittance based economy. Someone commented that remittances are a smaller part of the economy of late (and that might well be true), but in the last decade or so Kerala is also heavily in debt.

I think the main point of the opposition argument is that it's Kerala's religious demographics that led the state to be dependent on Middle Eastern remmitence. If you did a demographic survey of South Asians in the Middle East, the vast majority of them would be Muslim. It's a good way to reach a lower middle income level, but it's not achieving the type of growth needed to build industry and service.

You aren’t keeping up then. Remittances is a much smaller % of economy these days.

Ten years back remittance was 31% of the GDP [1] - a massive number. It might have declined, but the tiny state accounts for 20% of India's inward remittance while holding a mere 3% of the nation's population. Wikipedia says that 3 million people are working abroad (mostly in the middle East), which is like 10 percent of the population (what percentage of the youth will that be?). Also, a very significant number of Malayalees work in neighbouring states - again due to Kerala having no industries.

I don't have numbers for the last ten years, but if remittance has gone down, it is also neck deep in debt. I am in Kerala quite frequently, and can confirm that there are no industries there - except for tourism, and some IT which is relatively miniscule compared to neighbouring states.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Kerala

Remittances for 2023 made up 23% of state GDP.

Table 5.2, pg 51 of https://iimad.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/KMS-2023-Report...

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