[News] Kerala Has Abolished Extreme Poverty: The Fiftieth Newsletter (2025)
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Thu Dec 11 13:03:58 EST 2025
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Kerala Has Abolished Extreme Poverty: The Fiftieth Newsletter (2025)
The Indian state of Kerala has eradicated extreme poverty through clear
public policy, decentralised planning, and the leadership of its
cooperative movement.
Junaina Muhammad (Young Socialist Artists), /Kudumbashree/, 2025.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
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On 1 November 2025, the south-western Indian state of Kerala – home to
34 million people – was declared
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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
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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
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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.
Vanshika Babbar (Young Socialist Artists), /Udayapuram Cooperative
Workers/, 2025.
Over the past few years, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
has worked closely with the Uralungal Labour Contract Cooperative
Society (UL) Research Centre to build knowledge about the cooperative
movement in Kerala. We are very proud to publish our joint study /The
Cooperative Movement in Kerala, India/
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within a month of Kerala’s declaration of eradicating extreme poverty.
Our study profiles six different cooperatives, with essays researched
and written by scholars who have worked closely with them. One essay
focuses on Kudumbashree, an all-women cooperative with nearly five
million members, which played a major role in implementing the EPEP.
Kerala’s first democratic government, which came into office in 1957,
was led by communists. It immediately began to execute a programme of
agrarian reform, including land redistribution, and to expand universal
social goods such as public education, health care, housing, and
libraries
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This democratisation of the rural landscape, combined with sustained
social mobilisation, hastened the journey of Kerala’s millions towards
social indicators that are the marvel of the world: near-total literacy,
very low infant and maternal mortality, high life expectancy, and some
of the highest human-development scores in India. These investments,
built over decades, created the conditions for poverty eradication long
before the targeted programmes emerged. Communist-led coalitions have
governed Kerala from 1957–1959, 1967–1969, 1980–1981, 1987–1991,
1996–2001, 2006–2011, and 2016 to the present. Even when the left was
not in power, social mobilisation by the left ensured that right-wing
governments could not fully reverse these gains.
Kadambari (Young Socialist Artists), /Dinesh Beedi’s Read Aloud
Programme/, 2025.
With the growth of the neoliberal debt-austerity model in the 1990s,
pressure grew on the LDF government to reverse some of these projects
and adopt privatisation. However, the LDF chose a different path.
Through the People’s Plan Campaign
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for Decentralised Planning, launched in 1996, the government devolved
40% of state expenditures to local governments and asked localities to
identify needs, design programmes, and allocate budgets for development
projects. Rather than develop a one-size-fits-all development and
poverty alleviation agenda, the people of Kerala built locally planned
and context-specific projects that focused on the emancipation of
exploited and marginalised communities, including Adivasis, Dalits, and
coastal communities. The campaign set in place a culture of democratised
social policy and nourished a dense network of public institutions and
cooperatives – all of which were crucial for the EPEP.
When he announced the end of extreme poverty in Kerala, Chief Minister
Vijayan presented the EPEP as a continuation of this long trajectory. He
highlighted several initiatives that had paved the way for the
programme, including the universalisation of the Public Distribution
System, which provides subsidised food and fuel, and long-term efforts
to eradicate landlessness and homelessness, including the LIFE Mission,
which has provided homes to well over 400,000 families across the state.
To these we can add other pillars of Kerala’s model – state schemes that
have expanded public health care, food distribution, educational
assistance, and employment opportunities, and indeed the cooperatives.
Together these initiatives have transformed social life in Kerala and
strengthened the character of its left movement.
Abhinav VK Satheesh (Young Socialist Artists), /Workers from Kerala’s
Cooperatives/, 2025.
Our study
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with the UL Research Centre provides a window into the various
cooperatives that have played a key role in the democratisation of
Kerala’s economy. Formed in 1998 as part of the state’s poverty
eradication mission, Kudumbashree, which means ‘prosperity of the
family’ in Malayalam, is now the largest women’s mutual aid network in
the world. It is built around a transformative idea: if women at the
household and community level build their confidence and capacity to
assess economic life, then the locus of development can shift from
patriarchal institutions towards working women’s needs. Collective
farms, community kitchens, cooperative skill development initiatives,
and other forms of joint enterprise have allowed the women of
Kudumbashree to increase their income and build power in both public and
private life. Kudumbashree’s emphasis on solidarity rather than
competition and on collective rather than individual entrepreneurship
sets it apart from market-centric poverty-alleviation strategies.
Recently, the government of Kerala announced a Women’s Security Scheme
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based on the necessity of recognising the value of unpaid household
work. Eligible women between the ages of 35 and 60 will receive ₹1,000
per month. Such an initiative is part of the overall attempt to
transform patriarchal property relations in Kerala.
Kudumbashree is part of a wider ecosystem of cooperatives that sustain
Kerala’s fight against poverty. Taken together, these initiatives are
powerful examples of how, in Marx’s words, ‘hired labour is but a
transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated
labour plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous
heart’. They show that cooperatives are not only safety nets for the
poor but also vehicles for democratic planning, technological advance,
and social dignity.
These include:
*
*The Uralungal Labour Contract Cooperative Society (UL).* Founded in
1925 in northern Kerala as a mutual aid society for construction
labourers facing caste-based exclusion, UL has grown into one of
Asia’s largest workers’ cooperatives, employing tens of thousands in
major infrastructure projects. It shows how worker-controlled
enterprises can deliver complex public works while expanding social
protection and collective welfare for its workers and the
surrounding community.
*
*Kerala’s network of credit cooperatives.* More than four thousand
credit cooperatives, with tens of millions of mostly working-class
and marginalised members, operate as ‘people’s banks’ that reach
areas private finance will not. By protecting borrowers from
moneylenders, anchoring land reform, and mobilising local savings –
including during the 2018 floods and the COVID-19 pandemic – they
provide the financial backbone for poverty eradication.
*
*The Kerala Dinesh Beedi Workers’ Central Cooperative Society.*
Formed in 1969 after private /beedi/ (a thin, hand-rolled cigarette)
factory owners shut down their workplaces rather than implement new
labour protections, Dinesh Beedi quickly became the leading beedi
producer in southern India. It secured higher wages, social
security, and a rich cultural life for its members, and later
diversified away from tobacco to preserve jobs in socially useful
production.
*
*The Sahya Tea Cooperative Factory.* In Idukki’s hill country, small
tea growers and agricultural workers used the 15,000-member
Thankamany Service Cooperative Bank to establish their own factory
in 2017 and break from ‘Big Tea’ monopolies. Processing 15,000
kilograms of leaves a day and employing more than 150 workers, Sahya
secures better prices for around 3,500 growers and demonstrates how
small producers can move up the value chain and defend dignified
livelihoods.
*
*The Udayapuram Labour Contract Cooperative Society.* In Kodom
Belur, a remote panchayat in Kasaragod, villagers facing feudal
landlordism, corrupt officials, and predatory contractors organised
a labour cooperative in 1997. From just over two hundred members it
has grown to nearly three thousand worker-members, including many
Adivasis, who now execute public works on transparent, fair terms
and shape local development priorities themselves.
Taken together, these cooperatives – alongside Kudumbashree – show what
becomes possible when state policy, social reform, and organised workers
converge. They do more than soften the blows of the market. They
reorganise production around human need, deepen democracy in the
workplace and the village, and offer a living glimpse of associated
labour in practice – of possible communism – even under the harsh
conditions of contemporary capitalism that make programmes like the EPEP
necessary.
Kerala’s poverty eradication story is not without challenges. The state
is still within the Indian Union and therefore vulnerable to the
vicissitudes of policy-making by the right-wing government in New Delhi.
Like many parts of the Global South, Kerala’s youth face high
unemployment and often migrate to the Persian Gulf region and other
parts of the world for work. Attempts to build new quality productive
forces
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that could allow the state to leapfrog outdated industries are held back
by limited access to tax revenues collected from the state by the
central government. Nonetheless, there are ongoing attempts to overcome
these limitations and build a more robust growth paradigm for Kerala.
Navin S. (Young Socialist Artists), /Tailors of Dinesh Apparels/, 2025.
In February 2021, President Xi Jinping announced that nearly 99 million
Chinese people had lifted themselves out of extreme poverty, the last of
the country’s impoverished. The country of 1.4 billion people did this a
decade in advance of the date set by the United Nations Sustainable
Development Goals for 2030
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Kerala achieved its goal a year before expected. Vietnam, another
country close to this achievement, plans to end extreme poverty by 2030.
It is no surprise that all three of these projects are led by communist
parties, whose commitment to human emancipation drives them to work to
ensure that every human being can live a dignified life. Poverty
eradication is not an end in itself but a part of the long journey for
human emancipation – it is a living social project, not a set of boxes
that must be ticked off. As Kwame Nkrumah said, ‘forward ever, backward
never’.
Warmly,
Vijay
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