I've been reading Govindan Parayil's study of India, and a few ideas from it have stuck with me enough that I wanted to write them down.

One small thing that stopped me was a simple comparison: what is the relative population of Kerala and Canada today, and how does that compare to 1996? It's the kind of question that seems trivial until you actually sit with it, since it reframes a state most people think of as a region of India into something closer in scale to an entire country.

There's a line from Samir Amin that I think is really good: "it is incorrect to think that nothing can be done until revolution, and that until then 'the worst is the best'." I like this because it pushes back on a kind of fatalism that shows up a lot in development thinking, the idea that incremental progress is pointless or even counterproductive until some larger structural change happens. Amin's line is a reminder that you can do real good in the meantime.

On the other hand, I'm more skeptical of a claim attributed to Amartya Sen, that China could have achieved its population targets without resorting to draconian coercive measures had its leadership followed non-coercive persuasion through the instruments of democracy, guaranteeing political rights and freedom of choice the way Kerala did. That seems like an oversimplification to me. Kerala's success on this front came with a very particular set of conditions (literacy, land reform, political mobilization) that aren't trivially transferable to a country the size of China, and I'm not sure the counterfactual is as clean as the argument implies.

One part of Kerala's land reform that stood out to me was the right given to tenant households to retain full ownership of their dwellings plus full title to one tenth of an acre of the house compound land. It's an interesting idea, but I think it only really works in landed areas with arable ground where people are capable of farming that land. I honestly have no idea how this would work in most of the United States, or in generally capitalistic societies, or at least societies where capitalism dominates over agrarianism or socialism. But in the context of Kerala, where the land and the people's relationship to it look very different, it makes sense.

Parayil also keeps returning to a point I find compelling: you can't set out a course to develop a place sustainably. You can only, after the fact, determine whether a place developed sustainably. Sustainability isn't a plan you execute, it's a judgment you make in retrospect.

I also agree with his skepticism of growth-based per capita income as an indicator of development. On its own, it's fairly meaningless. It doesn't directly factor in things like a low population growth rate, low infant mortality, a low crude death rate, or a high literacy rate, even if it indirectly correlates with some of them.

There's a passage that stuck with me about the East Asian tigers: "the East Asian 'tigers' are special cases of export led development, made special by their political and economic dependence on the industrialised West for specific historical reasons. The sustainability of the 'spectacular' growth and development of these nations is dependent on the economies of the West. Also, the 'development' of these nations and states is occurring at a very high cost, such as deteriorating environmental conditions and poor civil and democratic rights for workers and ordinary citizens." I think this holds for most of the tigers, though probably not China. But I find it an interesting rebuttal to the narrative that India is somehow behind while the rest of East Asia got it right. That narrative leaves a lot out, and I think the decision by these countries to rely on the West for export and participation in an international economy is a large part of why they're seen as economically more prosperous, and has little to do with the people or culture of the countries themselves.