Vijay Prashad in Scheerpost:
On 1 November 2025, the south-western Indian state of Kerala – home to 34 million people – was declared free from extreme poverty by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. Kerala is one of the few places in the world to have eradicated extreme poverty, following China, which announced in 2022 that it had eradicated extreme poverty nationwide. Kerala’s achievement is significant for two reasons. First, in a country where hundreds of millions of people still live in poverty, Kerala is the only one of India’s twenty-eight states and eight union territories to have overcome extreme poverty. Second, Kerala is governed by the Communist-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) and is therefore routinely denied assistance from the central government led by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party).
Kerala’s Athidaridrya Nirmarjana Paripaadi (Extreme Poverty Eradication Project, or EPEP) was built on decades of worker and peasant struggles, which created strong public institutions and mass organisations, and the work of several left administrations. The EPEP was launched by Vijayan – a leader in the Communist Party of India (Marxist) – during the first Cabinet meeting of the second LDF government led by him in May 2021. After a rigorous criteria-based process focused on households’ access to employment, food, health, and housing, the government identified 64,006 families (or 103,099 individuals) as extremely poor. To carry out this survey, the government relied on about 400,000 enumerators – including government workers, cooperative members, and members of the mass organisations of left parties – to identify the unique problems faced by poor families. These enumerators created tailored plans for each family – from securing entitlements and accessing public services to obtaining housing, health care, and livelihood support – to build their strength in the fight against poverty. The role of the cooperative movement was fundamental in this campaign. The planning process for poverty eradication would not have been possible without the role of the local self-government system, the result of Kerala’s successful decentralisation of power. As this newsletter goes out, Kerala is in the midst of new local body elections.
More here.
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