The Hindu : Kerala / Thiruvananthapuram News : Quick decision-maker with administrative acumen

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Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram

Quick decision-maker with administrative acumen

Special Correspondent

Thiruvananthapuram: The former Chief Minister K. Karunakaran was an able administrator and quick and decisive decision-maker, a quality of his that has won acceptance across the political divide. Kerala owes a lot to him for taking the State into a development mode through a plethora of projects, many of them innovative.

The list of development projects he initiated or nursed is unending: Technopark, the State's flagship information technology promoter, and Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology in the State capital; the Nedumbassery airport and Jawaharlal Nehru International Stadium in Kochi; and the Pariyaram medical college in Kannur are some of the development landmarks he achieved. He was instrumental in initiating Kerala into the era of electronics manufacturing, through the flagship company Keltron, promoting its initiatives to bring television to the State.

Experiments

He was willing to experiment with various development models. It was under his tenure as Chief Minister during 1991-95 that Technopark, the country's first electronics technology park, was established. Though the foundation stone for the park was laid at the end of the previous Left Democratic Front regime under E.K. Nayanar, Karunakaran extended total support to the project, which was commissioned ahead of schedule. At the heights of factional fights, his government took over the RG-CDEST, then a non-governmental organisation headed by G. Karthikeyan, a protégé who led a revolt against him along with Ramesh Chennithala, and converted it into an institution fostering biotechnology research. Later, this came to be known as Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Biotechnology.

He used his clout to scale down the Navy's objection to the Nedumbassery airport, reckoned as the first major airport to be constructed under a public-private initiative.

He was also the first to promote the concept of self-financing institutions in the government sector to foster higher education. His move to open up professional education to the private sector met with stiff opposition, but later it came to be adopted as a major development programme.

During his tenure as Chief Minister between 1982 and 1987, he supported reforms in the higher secondary education sector by promoting the pre-degree board, which too met with considerable opposition. Even while maintaining a left-of-centre political position, he was far-sighted enough to understand the changing contours of the country's economic policy perspectives and fine-tune them to suit the State's interests and change his own political positions.

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