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Reorient decentralisation: Patnaik

Special Correspondent

Says focus should be shifted back to empowerment of the masses

`Poverty and unemployment are becoming worse.'

Thiruvananthapuram: State Planning Board Vice-Chairman Prabhat Patnaik, on Saturday, called for a reorientation of the decentralisation process in Kerala to shift the focus back to empowerment of the masses.

Inaugurating a State-level working camp of the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad here, he warned that decentralisation had become part of administrative reforms. "Today, it has emerged as an elongation of the bureaucracy. The decentralisation promoted by the World Bank is not identical to that in EMS Namboodiripad's vision," he said.

Deriding the bid to create a feel-good view of society, Mr. Patnaik said the development agenda in the State had become the victim of a phoney consensus built around desirable achievements. "This middle-class consensus seeks to promote the notion that we have got rid of poverty and that unemployment is a problem only for educated youth. Meeting middle class aspirations was our priority. The Kerala model of development was held up as an example for the Third World. But the problem with the model was that it was based on a stagnant economy that depended entirely on remittances from abroad."

Feudal framework

Mr. Patnaik said the tremendous social achievements in Kerala were confined to the framework of a feudal system. "We mistook the feudal welfare State for a social democratic welfare State. The problems of poverty and unemployment exist in Kerala and they are becoming worse.

The manufacture of the phoney middle class consensus is a weapon of imperialism."

Mr. Patnaik stressed the need to protect the embattled petty production sector in Kerala. "The land reforms in Kerala dealt a blow for feudalism and created conditions conducive for petty producers to thrive. But in the neo-liberal regime, the sector is under attack from global capital. The collapse of market prices and the dispossession of farmers and other producers in the name of special economic zones and real estate development threaten to aggravate the crisis. Proposals like rural business hubs and corporate farming are no solution."

Mr. Patnaik said that State support was the only answer to the crisis facing the petty producers. "It could be in the form of group farming or cooperative ventures."

He added that the need to protect embattled sections of society, such as small farmers and petty producers, formed the basic approach to the 11th Five Year Plan.

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