Kerala 2005 - of Planning Commission

CHAPTER 10
BY WAY OF CONCLUSION: SUGGESTIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
165
performed an important role in making the state literate,
sending children to school and give priority to their health
care requirements. The demographic transition owes at
least partly to this.
impact on the society (encouraging sex trade and
drug trafficking), economy (very little benefits to local
communities) and environment (littering and pollution)
of the region (Jithendran and Baum, 2001). A mission
mode approach with a time-bound plan, for what has
come to be termed as ‘sustainable tourism’ is called for
to institutionalise a system which aims at improving the
material and non-material well being of communities
through the involvement of local resources/communities
in the tourism programme, protecting biological diversity
and emphasising environmental sanitation consisting of
waste disposal, treatment and management. The rush
for rapid tourism and its ‘commercialisation’ needs to
be discouraged. All available sources of financial and
technical assistance should be tapped for promoting
’sustainability oriented’ tourism.
Similarly while adopting steps to raise agricultural
productivity as part of a growth strategy, as for instance in
the case of cashew cultivation in north Kerala, given the
growing demand for cashew kernels inside and outside
the country since the 1990s, the impact of pesticide use
on human well being has to be an important matter for
consideration. Recent reports have brought out the fact
that the continuous application of pesticides, such as
endosulfan in this case, through aerial spraying on cashew
plantations has impacted negatively on the health of the
human population (Rajendran, 2002).
4. Gender Freedom and Unfreedom
Kerala’s record in achieving high human development
even at low levels of income is commendable also from the
point of its gender dimension. In fact in many respects, girls
and women perform better than their male counterparts. It
is no exaggeration to say that women’s agencies in Kerala
However, such high levels of human development of
women have not translated to comprehensive gender
freedom. More than anything else, this is evident in
the high incidence of unemployment especially of the
school educated. As Chapter 7 has shown, the incidence
of unemployment among women with 8 to 12 years of
education (middle to secondary levels) is two-and-half
to four times higher than men with similar educational
attainments in rural and urban areas, respectively. Labour
market discrimination is revealed through the narrow
range of employment opportunities and a very low work
participation rate. However, in opportunities opening up
for them as for instance in the IT sector, tourism sector,
as sales assistants in shops/establishments or as emigrant
nurses, the vulnerability of women has to be well
recognised and their safely/security ensured.
From both an economic and social point of view, it is
a major challenge to tap the energy and talent of young
educated women in Kerala. From the point of State
policy, there is need for the development of employable
skills for the currently unemployed and underemployed.
Given the fiscal constraints of the government, it may
not be feasible to rely entirely on government budgetary
allocations. A policy initiative is called for to provide
a framework for promotion of skills with appropriate
arrangements for certification to ensure high quality
standards. In such a framework, private, as well as the
non-profit sector participation is desirable to establish
training institutions.
It is the relatively poorer sections that experience high
incidence of educated unemployment because their
educational attainments are not high enough to secure
regular jobs. A partial solution to this problem is possible
through the strengthening of the Kudumbashree programme
through which a sizeable section of women from
relatively poorer households have been organised through
self-help-groups. The programme is capable of up-scaling
in terms of training for skills, development of a common
brand that would stand for quality, management of the
small enterprises initiated by women, common marketing
and related support system and a whole host of initiatives
that would address the twin problems of unemployment
and poverty interpreted in the sense of generalised
deprivation discussed in this Report.