FROM LITERACY TO LIVELIHOODS: TESTING KERALA’S CLAIM OF ‘ERADICATING EXTREME POVERTY’

On 1 November 2025, Kerala's Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan stood in a special session of the Legislative Assembly and declared that his state had rid itself of extreme poverty.

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ASHA workers on September 5, Kerala celebrated engaging in Onam dance in new traditional festival clothing at the protest venue at Thiruvanom. For over six months they have demanded a living wage and social security — a reminder, they say, that “Kerala’s poverty does not end with a speech.”

The announcement was made on Kerala Piravi (Kerala formation day) amid a television spectacle featuring film stars, and it followed a four-year Extreme Poverty Eradication Project (EPEP). Vijayan claimed that the programme had identified 64,006 households in the entire state who lacked adequate food, shelter, healthcare and income, drawn up customised micro-plans for each and had now lifted them out of destitution. Government data showed that the programme had built or renovated thousands of houses, allocated land, provided livelihoods and delivered health and nutrition services.

While the achievement was celebrated as proof of Kerala's distinctive development model, it immediately drew criticism. Opposition legislators boycotted the session, calling the declaration “pure fraud”. Economists and public intellectuals published an open letter asking the government to release the methodology and data, noting that Kerala still had nearly six hundred thousand households under the central government's Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY) “yellow card” category of the poorest. Tribal rights groups and local councils in coastal and plantation regions also questioned whether the state’s survey had missed many vulnerable families. To understand how a lower-middle-income state could proclaim the end of destitution, we need to look at the history of Kerala's social programmes, the design of the EPEP and how it compares with other poverty measures.