By Ignatius Chithelen
Editor’s note: This is an extract from the book “Kerala and Keralites: The Promise and Challenges,” 2026 version.
Keralites have made their mark around the globe. Accomplished professionals include Raj Subramaniam, Chief Executive of FedEx, and Vinod Thomas, an economist studying climate change, and former Director General at the Asian Development Bank. Business founders include Dev Ittycheria, former CEO of New York-based MongoDB, and Shamsheer Vayalil, founder of Burjeel Healthcare, Abu Dhabi. Also, cricketer Sanju Samson, who helped India win the 2026 T20 World Cup. Their education choices, career paths, and overcoming obstacles offer practical solutions, including to professionals as well as students and other exploring education and career options.
There are more than an estimated four million Keralites working outside India, mainly in the Persian Gulf countries. Their remittances boost consumer demand as well as home and land prices and labor wage rates in Kerala. If crude oil prices start declining around 2035, as some analysts forecast, will it reduce demand for foreign labor in the Gulf? Can Kerala create millions of new jobs, to replace those which may be cut in the Gulf, as well as generate new sources of income if remittances drop sharply?
Meanwhile, demand for land and higher labor wage rates impacts the farming of coconut, rubber, spices, and other cash crops, which continue to play a major role in Kerala’s economy. Labor wages in Kerala are among the highest in India, even with an influx of an estimated four million migrant laborers from Bihar and other poorer regions of India.
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Perhaps, due to historical, caste-based choices of work, the goal of most high school students in India is to earn a liberal arts degree, find a white-collar job, and rise up in the social hierarchy. Some of them will change their attitude once they see friends and neighbors working in high-paying, physical jobs.
Meanwhile, such an attitude leaves relatively more job and business opportunities for Keralites who are willing to dirty their hands. PC Musthafa, a laborer and son of a laborer, founded id Fresh Foods in 2005. The Bangalore-based company, which sells idli and dosa batter, employs more than 2,400, some of whom are millionaires since Musthafa paid them partly in stock.
A major achievement, resulting from Kerala’s long-established focus on education, is that Keralite women are a major beneficiary of the rising global demand for nurses.
Today, Kerala should use its scarce funds to set up globally recognized, jobs-related, skills training programs, for post-high school students. Such as emergency medical staff, electricians, plumbers, and welders. Thousands more Keralites can then find work, in India and abroad, similar to nurses.
Instead, ruling politicians, from both rival coalitions which alternately rule the state, mostly fund liberal arts college programs. For instance, the 2026-2027 budget, passed by the previous left coalition government, allotted Rs 2.6 billion, $26 million, for just one liberal arts program: free undergraduate programs. This fee-subsidy is higher than the entire $24 million allotted to post-high school technical education.
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Presumably, politicians view setting up liberal college programs as a cheaper way to claim they are expanding job opportunities. This policy is also backed by unions of teachers, government employees, unemployed graduates, and liberal arts students. There is little critical analysis of the education strategy by most policy advisors, journalists, and academics, perhaps because they are mostly liberal arts graduates.
But expanding funding for liberal arts college programs is a waste of scarce funds. It merely generates more graduates who cannot find jobs. Already, Kerala has roughly 650,000 unemployed graduates, according to Kerala Government data. The actual number is likely far higher.
Kerala has a unique socio-economic condition: high literacy, good healthcare and welfare programs. Yet, high unemployment, dependence on migrant worker income, and budget deficits. Can politicians in the state agree on a minimum program: pursue policies to create more high-paying jobs and reduce dependence on jobs in the Persian Gulf, which may not exist in about a decade?
(Ignatius Chithelen, publisher of Global Indian Times, is manager of Banyan Tree Capital, New York. Neither he nor Banyan hold positions in any of the companies mentioned.
Profits, if any, from the book “Kerala and Keralites” will fund copies of classic books in literature, science, economics, and other fields, at a public library in Kerala.)