KERALA will announce the elimination of extreme poverty tomorrow — the first Indian state to achieve it.

The announcement is timed for Kerala Piravi (Kerala Day), as the southern state enters the 70th year since its foundation on November 1 1956.

The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M)-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) government committed to eliminate extreme poverty by this date shortly after re-election in 2021, and immediately launched a state-wide investigation to identify people in the category — defined as severe deprivation in four core areas: nutritious food, safe housing, basic income, and health status.

Kerala has long had by far the lowest poverty rate in India — 0.55 per cent of the population compared to 16.22 per cent nationally or 33.76 per cent in the state with the highest poverty level, Bihar — but CPI-M journal People’s Democracy commented: “For the LDF government no person is negligible; not a single individual is to be disregarded or left behind.”

The survey identified just over 100,000 people as living in extreme poverty amid Kerala’s population of 36 million, before implementing a poverty elimination campaign involving community mobilisation, the despatch of hundreds of volunteers to poor areas (as practised in China’s absolute poverty elimination programme), and provision of ration cards and health insurance to thousands of families.

Direct food distribution was also rolled out, distributed through the all-women Kudumbashree network, a Kerala-founded programme focused on poverty elimination and women’s empowerment that has spread to other states.

Kerala’s Local Self-Government department then developed “micro-plans” in consultation with every affected family to bring them out of extreme poverty by this November, with measures including allocation of extra land, study scholarships, home renovations or new builds and employment schemes.

“The Left Democratic Front — which is enjoying its second term in succession and aiming for a hat-trick early in 2026 — has facilitated this remarkable shift,” Kerala State Planning Board member K Ravi Raman wrote in The Indian Express.

“It is powerful and irrefutable proof that communist ideology is not mere fantasy but an organising principle that has the power to transform the present, opening up the future to fresh possibilities.”