For V.K. Ramachandran, who took over as the new vice chairman of the Kerala State Planning Board on Monday, Kerala is not just his native State, but familiar physical and intellectual space to which he has been returning frequently for the past several years. In his new assignment, Prof. Ramachandran has his task cut out, as he himself puts it, ‘to operationalise the ambitious but doable aspects of the Left Democratic Front (LDF) manifesto’.
Implement LDF agenda“My job will be basically to try, in consultation with the government, to operationalise the ambitious but doable aspects of the LDF manifesto… The march undertaken by the present Chief Minister before the elections also threw up a lot of problems of the people. Also the Congress on Kerala Studies [organised by the A.K.G Centre for Research and Studies]. That made a major difference. I had participated in every one of them, five of them so far. It was such a broad initiative. Let us see,” Prof. Ramachandran told The Hindu , while replying to a question how he plans to go forward in his new assignment, refusing to spell out specifics. .
“I feel humbled by the invitation to lead the State Planning Board, following on the footsteps of such distinguished scholars as I.S. Gulati and Prabhath Patnaik. I must also recall Mathew Kurien, who did so much serious work,” he said.
Prof. Ramachandran has studied and written extensively on Kerala, the most important of these being the essays On Kerala’s Development Achievements, which appeared in the book Indian Development: Selected Regional Perspectives , edited jointly by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen.
