Kerala & Infrastructure

Industrial revolution did bypass Kerala. Poor chaps who started some factory or the other in the state of Kerala bled to death. Only after the demise of so called factory & the entrepreneur, the workers did realise that they require regular income. After a while, some of the workers too committed suicide. That was Kerala in the long past.

Better sense prevailed in malayalees & they started getting trained in technical as well as secretarial stuff. Once they learned the ropes, all flocked to middle east & started earning a nice salary. During my childhood, we watched in awe uncles who came from gulf on leave. They brought nice clothes, toys, electronic gadgets not to forget the perfumes & sweets. Even though many worked in gulf on manual labour, with the influx of money from outside, stratification of jobs started taking place. All of a sudden everybody wanted a 'white collar' job. In the nineties manual labour became a taboo for mallu youth. Thanks to the 'All promotion' policy of alternating governments, we have a lot of educated unemployed youth.

When IT industry was shaping up in India, Keralites had a good role. With Software Technology Parks, Kerala became a good destination for multinational companies. However governmental support has been not very encouraging and companies started moving off. One example that I know personally was that of a company that does back end jobs for airline reservations. They wanted to buy some land in Kovalam to start their own campus. Surely the company had enough money but things did not augur well. They were offered office space in some IT park or the other & the company shifted to Bangalore.

Somehow the IT park concept still lives on. Recently there was a news item saying that construction works of IT park at Pallipuram, Cherthala has come to a standstill owing to wages issues. It was reported that workers are demanding a 35% hike. The current wages were reported to be at Rs. 310 per day. In a private organisation, annual increment might just barely touch the 35% figure. In case of public sector or governmental organisations, annual increment dies not come to that level. The absolute value of daily wages does not amuse me much. But for a normal guy in north india, the amount is pretty high. Since the report did not mention what skill category gets Rs. 310 perday, comparisons vis-a-vis prevailing rates elsewhere are uncalled for. I am just concerned about the quantum of increase that is being demanded. Are we going back in time to the factory era?

All infrastructure related works involve a lot of manual labour since there is a lot of concreting involved. When will we have better class roads, bridges, railway lines, ports etc in Kerala ? Since we are "God's Own Country", may be we should approach Him for an answer. For those who don't have a direct approach, we have so many varieties of middle men in the form of astrologers, swamies, aasammies etc