Shibu: A re-emerging Kerala is most needed

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Taking a dig at the hype over ‘Emerging Kerala’, RSP leader and labour minister Shibu Baby John has said that Kerala needs to ‘re-emerge’ in some of the key sectors in which it got ‘submerged’ in the recent past and “should revisit land reforms.”

“We need a ‘Re-emerging Kerala’ at this hour and not an ‘Emerging Kerala’, he says.

Kerala had ‘emerged’ long back in the Renaissance period and then got submerged,” he said in a post in his Facebook account on Tuesday evening, which instantly triggered a debate on the social site.

He queried whether the governments had been able to retain the progress the state had made. Kerala had been able to reach world standards in the five key sectors of general education, public health, public distribution system, drinking water supply and transport.

Shibu said Kerala’s education system was now in a shambles. “A professional degree holder of the present doesn’t have the skill of a 10th qualified student of yesteryear,” he said.

In the healthcare segment, Kerala once notched top world ranks. The free health care that we secured through the primary health centres had given way to private hospitals.

The common man could no more afford the cost of treatment. “There is no insurance scheme as well,” he said.

“We had a great public distribution system, but what is happening at present is the daylight looting of it,” Shibu said.

He wondered what was happening to the wetlands and drinking water sources of a land which was once full green.