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Is there an alternative model to small family farming that could provide sustainable livelihoods to millions of resource-constrained and often non-viable smallholders in developing countries? Could group farming constitute such an alternative, wherein smallholders voluntarily pool land, labour and capital to create larger farms that they manage collectively? In South Asia, for instance, over 85% of farmers are small and increasingly female. Potentially, group farming could provide them economies of scale, a dependable labour force, more investible funds and skills, and greater bargaining power with governments and markets. But can this potential be realised in practice? In particular, can group farms economically outperform small family farms? A rare opportunity to test this is provided by two experiments begun in the 2000s in the Indian states of Kerala and Telangana. Constituted only of women, the groups lease in land to farm collectively, sharing labour, the cost of inputs, and the returns. But the states differ in several respects, including the technical support the groups receive, and their institutional base, composition, land access and cropping patterns. Based on the author's primary sample surveys in both states, this paper compares the productivity and profitability of group farms with that of small individual family farms in the same state. Kerala’s groups perform strikingly better than the predominantly male-managed individual farms, both in their annual value of output per hectare and annual net returns per farm, while in Telangana group farms perform much worse than individual farms in annual output, but are equivalent in net returns. In both states, groups do much better in commercial crops than in traditional foodgrains, where the largely male-managed individual farms, owning good quality land and with longer farm management experience, have an advantage. The factors underlying the differential performances of Kerala and Telangana, and the lessons learnt for possible replication, are also discussed. Overall, the paper demonstrates that group farming can provide an effective alternative, subject to specified conditions and adaptation of the model to the local context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Income diversification continues to be a key strategy for poor rural households, including those that are progressively developing and those operating under increasing distress. The ability of a household to diversify has been shown to depend upon its demographic and economic characteristics and its physical and social context. This paper considers the effects of intra-village social networks on household income diversification in one of the poorest and most ethnically diverse areas of the Indian state of Kerala. Using techniques adapted from spatial econometrics, we find that social connections within a village magnify the impacts of household characteristics such as education and number of adults by a factor of 3.6 times. Models with alternative measures of network centrality (degree and eigenvector) indicate that the number of network connections that a household has is more important than the centrality of those connections. Finally, we use social contact information to calculate assortative mixing based on caste. The results suggest social stratification in these villages, with higher levels of stratification associated with lower levels of income diversification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary The link between e-governance and development has been widely leveraged for policy formulation in India, however, little is known about its application to food security. This paper fills the gap with a study of Kerala, where the Public Distribution System (PDS), the main national food security program, has been digitalized in its main functions. Findings reveal that the digital program has been purposefully devised to combat the problem of diversion (“rice mafia”) of PDS goods to the market: however, issues of partial coverage and mistargeting remain. Lessons are drawn for other states computerizing the PDS and their social safety nets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• COVID-19 presents great challenges for virus control and social security in rural areas of developing countries. • We examine the role of elected village governments in coordinating state response in Rajasthan, Odisha, and Kerala, India. • Urgent needs have galvanized new cross-sectoral and multi-scalar interactions that link state action with local realities. • Evidence from Kerala illustrates how long-term support for local governments improves public trust and effectiveness of response. • Governance is as important to understanding COVID-19 impacts and recovery as biology, demography, and economy. Countries around the world have undertaken a wide range of strategies to halt the spread of COVID-19 and control the economic fallout left in its wake. Rural areas of developing countries pose particular difficulties for developing and implementing effective responses owing to underdeveloped health infrastructure, uneven state capacity for infection control, and endemic poverty. This paper makes the case for the critical role of local governance in coordinating pandemic response by examining how state authorities are attempting to bridge the gap between the need for rapid, vigorous response to the pandemic and local realities in three Indian states – Rajasthan, Odisha, and Kerala. Through a combination of interviews with mid and low-level bureaucrats and a review of policy documents, we show how the urgency of COVID-19 response has galvanized new kinds of cross-sectoral and multi-scalar interaction between administrative units involved in coordinating responses, as local governments have assumed central responsibility in the implementation of disease control and social security mechanisms. Evidence from Kerala in particular suggests that the state's long term investment in democratic local government and arrangements for incorporating women within grassroots state functions (through its Kudumbashree program) has built a high degree of public trust and cooperation with state actors, while local authorities embrace an ethic of care in the implementation of state responses. These observations, from the early months of the pandemic in South Asia, can serve as a foundation for future studies of how existing institutional arrangements and their histories pattern the long-term success of disease control and livelihood support as the pandemic proceeds. Governance, we argue, will be as important to understanding the trajectory of COVID-19 impacts and recovery as biology, demography, and economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Kerala's pandemic management has been a decisive test of the "Kerala model of development". • Behind Kerala's relative success were robust public institutions, the legacy of the "Kerala model" built over many years. • This pandemic shows that even a participatory social democratic state face tough challenge in managing crises and guaranteeing basic security. • Adversarial politics and absence of consensus-based democratic approach led to the surge in Covid 19 in Kerala. Kerala, a small state in South India, has been celebrated as a development model by scholars across the world for its exemplary achievements in human development and poverty reduction despite relatively low GDP growth. It was no surprise, then, that the Covid 19 pandemic that hit Kerala before any other part of India, became a test case for the Kerala model in dealing with such a crisis. Kerala was lauded across the world once again as a success story in containing this unprecedented pandemic, in treating those infected, and in making needed provisions for those adversely affected by the lockdown. But as it turned out, this celebration was premature as Kerala soon faced a third wave of Covid 19 infections. The objective of this paper is to examine Kerala's trajectory in achieving the success and then confronting the unanticipated reversal. It will examine the legacy of the Kerala model such as robust and decentralized institutions and provisions for healthcare, welfare and safety nets, and especially the capacity of a democratic state working in synergy with civil society and enjoying a high degree of consensus and public trust. It will then examine the new surge of the virus and attempts to establish if this was due to any mistakes made by the state or some deficits in its model of "public action" that includes adversarial politics having a disruptive tenor about it. We will conclude by arguing that the Kerala model is still relevant, and that it is still a model in motion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]