Kerala State, India: Radical Reform as Development

1992 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard W. Franke ◽  
Barbara H. Chasin

Kerala State in southwestern India has achieved some of the third world's best rates of life expectancy, literacy, and infant mortality, despite one of the lowest per capita incomes. Especially notable is the nearly equal distribution of development benefits to urban, rural, male, female, high-caste, and low-caste sections of the populations. An even population distribution, a cosmopolitan trading history, and the development of militant worker and small farmer organizations led by dedicated activists provide the main explanations for Kerala's achievements. Land reform has redistributed wealth and political power from a rich elite to small holders and landless laborers. Public food distribution at controlled prices, large-scale public health actions, accessible medical facilities, and widespread literacy combine with and reinforce each other to maintain and expand Kerala's achievements. Serious unemployment threatens the Kerala experiment, but Kerala nonetheless offers important lessons to development planners, policymakers, and third world activists.

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 284
Author(s):  
Dan Lu ◽  
Yahui Wang ◽  
Qingyuan Yang ◽  
Kangchuan Su ◽  
Haozhe Zhang ◽  
...  

The sustained growth of non-farm wages has led to large-scale migration of rural population to cities in China, especially in mountainous areas. It is of great significance to study the spatial and temporal pattern of population migration mentioned above for guiding population spatial optimization and the effective supply of public services in the mountainous areas. Here, we determined the spatiotemporal evolution of population in the Chongqing municipality of China from 2000–2018 by employing multi-period spatial distribution data, including nighttime light (NTL) data from the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program’s Operational Linescan System (DMSP-OLS) and the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (NPP-VIIRS). There was a power function relationship between the two datasets at the pixel scale, with a mean relative error of NTL integration of 8.19%, 4.78% less than achieved by a previous study at the provincial scale. The spatial simulations of population distribution achieved a mean relative error of 26.98%, improved the simulation accuracy for mountainous population by nearly 20% and confirmed the feasibility of this method in Chongqing. During the study period, the spatial distribution of Chongqing’s population has increased in the west and decreased in the east, while also increased in low-altitude areas and decreased in medium-high altitude areas. Population agglomeration was common in all of districts and counties and the population density of central urban areas and its surrounding areas significantly increased, while that of non-urban areas such as northeast Chongqing significantly decreased.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Babak Khavari ◽  
Alexandros Korkovelos ◽  
Andreas Sahlberg ◽  
Mark Howells ◽  
Francesco Fuso Nerini

AbstractHuman settlements are usually nucleated around manmade central points or distinctive natural features, forming clusters that vary in shape and size. However, population distribution in geo-sciences is often represented in the form of pixelated rasters. Rasters indicate population density at predefined spatial resolutions, but are unable to capture the actual shape or size of settlements. Here we suggest a methodology that translates high-resolution raster population data into vector-based population clusters. We use open-source data and develop an open-access algorithm tailored for low and middle-income countries with data scarcity issues. Each cluster includes unique characteristics indicating population, electrification rate and urban-rural categorization. Results are validated against national electrification rates provided by the World Bank and data from selected Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS). We find that our modeled national electrification rates are consistent with the rates reported by the World Bank, while the modeled urban/rural classification has 88% accuracy. By delineating settlements, this dataset can complement existing raster population data in studies such as energy planning, urban planning and disease response.


Author(s):  
Victoria C. Stead

Although it diverges markedly from the vision of the Melanesian Way elaborated in the 1975 constitution, large-scale resource extraction has in recent decades been championed as the key mechanism for development in Papua New Guinea. In this context, forms of “middle-way” land reform are advocated as means of rendering customary land tenure commensurable with the requirements of modern, capitalist practices of production and economic activity. Principal amongst these are Incorporated Land Groups (ILGs) and lease-lease-back arrangements. Ethnographic exploration of communities affected by the tuna industry in Madang Province shows how these land reforms transform structures and cartographies of power, privileging the agents of the state and global capital at the same time that they transform relations of power within communities. At the same time, however, forms of codification and the assertion of landowner identities allow communities to make claims against outside agents involved in resource extractive activity on their lands.


2020 ◽  
pp. 370-401
Author(s):  
Neil Macmaster

Chapter 17 examines how Opération Pilote was implemented through a case study of the military sub-secteur of Ténès. A first problem in implementing Pilote arose from the fact that there were major disagreements within the army about the project. Some commanders resisted the new methods of the psychological warfare 5th bureaux, disliked the creation of a ‘parallel’ hierarchy of political commissars, while major tensions emerged between the civil authorities, the prefect Chevrier, and the generals. A close study of Pilote in the Dahra mountains shows that the aim of ‘pacification’ of each douar by cleansing the ALN and installing harkis autodefense, schools, medical teams, and a proto-municipal government was only successful in two highly mediatized locations, the Breira mine and Bou Maad. Far more typical was the situation in the Djebel Bissa where, following large-scale sweep operations and mass arrests, the army was unable to secure the terrain, and moved on rapidly before consolidating new communal organizations. The army command, frustrated at the slowness of Servier’s ‘hearts and minds’ approach, rapidly reverted to traditional methods of colonial warfare, the creation of zones interdites, bombing of civil populations, starvation, and the forced mass evacuation of peasants into army camps. A generalized ‘Massu model’ of cutting the vital ALN dependency on urban-rural supply networks was also tried in Ténès but failed.


2002 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 154-156
Author(s):  
Afshin Marashi

If the history of the Middle East in the 20th century is a history of fundamental social changes and dislocations, then surely one important part of that story is the transformation that took place in the agrarian sector of many Middle Eastern societies. The politics of landownership and the projects of land reform in the 20th century were indeed among the most ambitious of the statist projects undertaken during what we can now look back on as the “age of modernization.” Like so many large-scale projects of social engineering, land reform in the Middle East captured the optimism and idealism of modernization while producing some of its most brutal and unforeseen consequences.


2020 ◽  
pp. 002190962093746
Author(s):  
Clemence Rusenga

The South African government intends to improve rural livelihoods through land and agrarian reform. However, in doing so the government is enforcing large-scale production in the land reform projects with little regard for the beneficiaries’ background or capabilities, which are not suited to large-scale production. The article demonstrates how large-scale farming is negatively affecting land beneficiaries’ production by undermining their ability to produce the quality products (and adequate quantities) that satisfy the standards in the increasingly concentrated markets dominated by agribusiness.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Ngo Chi Thanh

The traditional food distribution system is often characterized by small farmers and of several retailer called middlemen who sell their products on market. Since the intermediaries and their market powers are largely considerable in the food market, this paper proposes an industrial organization model of the middlemen in this conventional food distribution system for developing countries. Since most of the works in this field has adopted an empirical approach, the focus of our study in this paper will be instead on theoretical model. In order to analyze this situation, we borrow several arguments from the theory of imperfect competition. We assume that middlemen have oliopsony and oligopoly power in the up and down stream of the food system. We defined the consumer behavior by discrete choice model and study the quantity flow from small producers to the consumers by mean of Cournot competition. We address the question of land reform policy implication by creating a productivity shock in order to examine the effect of this instrument on the wealth of both farmers and consumers.


Mammalia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 83 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-109
Author(s):  
Rong Fu ◽  
Li Li ◽  
ZhongHua Yu ◽  
Eve Afonso ◽  
Patrick Giraudoux

Abstract Studying elusive species of conservation concern might be difficult for technical and ethical reasons. However, censuses can be based on the observation of activity indices. When coupled to non-invasive genetic methods this approach can provide extremely precise information about population size, individual movements and diseases. However, the design of optimal sampling is dependent on a knowledge on group distribution and possible variations of detectability of index targets. The aim of this study was to document the distribution of Yunnan snub-nosed monkey indices in space and time in that perspective. Based on transects carried out across the range of a fed population and on counts along the trail across the range of a wild group, we show that 2–3 day stays of a group in a place of some hectares were sufficient to get an homogeneous distribution of indices. Furthermore, the number of indices found were dependent on both pig presence and season. On the other hand, on a large scale of 100 km2 indices were spatially distributed as nested clusters. Indices distribution indicated a strong preference towards southern slopes and altitudes ranging between 2900 and 3400 m. Those observations pinpoint the importance of considering spatial scale to organise sampling designed to estimate population distribution.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. e0245771
Author(s):  
Haroldo V. Ribeiro ◽  
Milena Oehlers ◽  
Ana I. Moreno-Monroy ◽  
Jürgen P. Kropp ◽  
Diego Rybski

Urban scaling and Zipf’s law are two fundamental paradigms for the science of cities. These laws have mostly been investigated independently and are often perceived as disassociated matters. Here we present a large scale investigation about the connection between these two laws using population and GDP data from almost five thousand consistently-defined cities in 96 countries. We empirically demonstrate that both laws are tied to each other and derive an expression relating the urban scaling and Zipf exponents. This expression captures the average tendency of the empirical relation between both exponents, and simulations yield very similar results to the real data after accounting for random variations. We find that while the vast majority of countries exhibit increasing returns to scale of urban GDP, this effect is less pronounced in countries with fewer small cities and more metropolises (small Zipf exponent) than in countries with a more uneven number of small and large cities (large Zipf exponent). Our research puts forward the idea that urban scaling does not solely emerge from intra-city processes, as population distribution and scaling of urban GDP are correlated to each other.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Qiuyang Huang ◽  
Yongjian Yang ◽  
Yuanbo Xu ◽  
En Wang ◽  
Kangning Zhu

The human origin-destination (OD) flow prediction is of great significance for urban safety control, stampede prevention, disease transmission control, urban planning, and many other aspects. Most of the existing methods generally divide the urban area into grids and use vehicle GPS trajectories and metrocard check-in data, combined with machine learning or deep learning models to predict human OD flow. However, these kinds of methods are challenging to capture fine-grained human mobility patterns. Moreover, these methods usually deviate from the actual human OD transfer patterns on a citywide scale due to the particularity of different datasets. To this end, in this paper, we use large-scale mobile phone signal data to achieve human OD flow prediction between the coverage of varying signal base stations. Many signal base stations are distributed in urban geographical space, collecting all the mobile phone user’s location information to obtain large-scale fine-grained unbiased human OD flow data. Due to the lack of natural topology structure between base stations, this paper adopts a TGCN model combined with a graph fusion module to pretrain the dynamic population distribution prediction task. The parameters of the graph fusion module are employed to capture the different semantic information in the proposed hybrid machine learning method and finally achieve citywide human OD flow prediction. Extensive experiments on the real-world signal datasets in Changchun, China, demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.


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