Cooperation in Production and Democratic Deepening: Lessons from Kerala, India

The Indian state of Kerala has had a development experience unique to the rest of the country. Kerala’s radical social movements and trade unionism since the beginning of the 20th century have created a state that is progressive and welfarist in its character, paving the way for radical reforms in social, economic and political spheres. However, Kerala’s development trajectory came across several challenges, particularly in agriculture, from the 1980s raising questions of sustainability and equity. The Left movement in Kerala initiated the participatory planning and democratic decentralization program in the late 1990s, aiming to address the growing concerns around sustainability of its development model. It is in this context that Kudumbashree, a grassroots network of women, emerged as a local response to growing livelihood concerns of ordinary women. Evolving into the state's vehicle for poverty eradication and women empowerment, Kudumbashree movement has enabled newer forms of accumulation patterns at the local level while playing an active role in the decentralization process. Kudumbashree’s collective farming initiative has been able to create sustainable livelihoods for landless agricultural workers amidst the deepening agrarian crisis in India. This paper explores the foundations democratic decentralization and participatory planning has laid in the state to create alternative forms of agricultural production based on cooperation and solidarity through the Kudumbashree movement. The paper argues that the Kudumbashree movement has become small repositories of developmentally valuable social capital rather than instruments of corruption or rent-seeking and the synergy between the state and society has been a catalyst for its emergence and evolution into a robust grassroots collective. The study sheds light on the role collective action based on cooperation and solidarity can play in people-centered development, socio-political empowerment of women and other processes of democratic deepening.