Rejoinder: Why superhighways risk derailing the ‘Kerala model’ of development

Kerala’s development miracle was never a miracle at all but the outcome of a long conversation between people and place. It was the slow flowering of a civilisational intelligence that learned to live with its geography rather than against it.

Once, when I was working at the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram, a Turkish economist visiting from the World Bank was asked by one of my colleagues: “If a country has limited funds, what two investments would yield the best results in the long run?”

He smiled and replied wryly, “As Keynes said, in the long run we are all dead. But in the initial part of that long run, the wisest investments would be female literacy and socio-economic infrastructure.”

Then he added, “You have done this in Kerala.”

That conversation has stayed with me for decades. It surfaces again now, as Kerala stands at a pivotal moment: the state is in the grip of a highway-building spree, promising a new era of speed and connectivity.

Yet, as I watch the bulldozers, the collapsing hillsides and the increasing accident rate, I recall the warnings echoed across the past century: from Thomas F Taylor’s “fallacy of speed” and Mohandas Gandhi’s critique of the motorcar as a symbol of a civilisation eroding...

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