On November 1, 2025 — Kerala Piravi Day — Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan declared that Kerala had eradicated extreme poverty, making it the first state in India to do so. The announcement, delivered in the state assembly with great fanfare, was projected as a historic milestone in the state’s welfare journey. It marked the culmination of the government’s flagship Extreme Poverty Eradication Project (EPEP), launched in 2021. Yet, behind the celebratory tone lies an uncomfortable question: Has Kerala really eliminated poverty, or merely redefined it?AdvertisementThe EPEP identified just over 64,000 families across the state as “extremely poor”. These were households that lacked secure income, housing, food, or access to healthcare. The state claims that targeted interventions — through housing schemes, livelihood support, and welfare linkages — have now lifted them out of destitution. The result, according to the government, is a poverty-free Kerala. But a closer look reveals that the project’s definition of “extreme poverty” was exceptionally narrow, and its ambition more managerial than transformative.Also Read | How Kerala eliminated extreme povertyA family earning a few hundred rupees a day through informal work, managing two meals, and living in a fragile home would not qualify as poor under this framework. The survey captured only the most visible and irrefutable forms of deprivation: Those without shelter, food, or basic healthcare. Once such households received some benefit — often one-time assistance — they were promptly removed from the list. Poverty was thus reduced to a checklist that could be ticked off and declared solved. In most wards, the survey found only two or three “extremely poor” families, a figure that does not reflect the lived realities of Kerala’s working poor, its informal labourers, tribal communities, and coastal populations.The problem here is not the intent to improve lives, but the politics of counting poverty out of existence. When poverty is defined narrowly, its eradication becomes easier to proclaim. This tendency is not unique to Kerala. The World Bank’s much-criticised poverty benchmark of around $2 a day has long enabled governments to show success without necessarily improving living standards. India’s own history of poverty estimation — from the Tendulkar and Rangarajan committees to NITI Aayog’s multidimensional poverty index — reflects a similar approach: minimalist measures that make the problem appear smaller, more manageable, and politically convenient.AdvertisementKerala’s declaration fits neatly into this global pattern. It represents a shift from confronting inequality to managing numbers, from redistribution to data optimisation. Poverty becomes a technical problem to be “fixed,” not a structural injustice to be transformed. In doing so, the government risks disconnecting poverty from its social and historical roots. The danger is that deprivation, inequality, and precarity may persist even as official statistics declare them resolved.Kerala’s social achievements are undeniable. It has the lowest poverty headcount in the country and some of the best human development indicators. But even in this success story, deep fissures remain. Landlessness continues to haunt Dalit and Adivasi communities; informal and insecure employment dominates the labour market; and rising inequality has quietly eroded the state’s egalitarian ethos. Declaring the state “poverty-free” without addressing these structural issues risks creating a false sense of completion, as though the project of social justice has reached its end.The political implications of such a declaration are significant. Once poverty is declared eradicated, it alters how budgets are framed, how policies are prioritised, and how the public perceives deprivation. It closes the space for further demands from marginalised groups and for continued investment in redistributive measures. What was once an open-ended moral commitment to justice becomes a closed administrative achievement. This “politics of closure” is particularly paradoxical for a Left-led government that once built its credibility on resisting neoliberal models of governance. By embracing the language of “targets met” and “extreme poverty eliminated”, it risks internalising the very managerial logic it used to critique.Kerala’s developmental success historically stemmed from a different imagination — one that treated poverty not as an isolated deficiency but as a product of social relations, inequality, and power. Its land reforms, decentralised planning, and participatory governance movements were premised on expanding rights and capabilities, not just delivering welfare schemes. The EPEP, in contrast, represents a more technocratic approach, where success is measured through the absence of names on a list rather than through the presence of dignity and opportunity in people’s lives.To be sure, lifting thousands of families from destitution is no small achievement. But the question is what happens after the declaration. When the government closes the book on “extreme poverty”, who speaks for those who still live on the margins — those who are not destitute enough to qualify as “extremely poor”, yet too precarious to live with stability or dignity? Poverty may be declared eradicated on paper, but inequality, vulnerability, and exclusion remain embedded in the everyday realities of many Keralites.most readThe true test for Kerala lies beyond symbolic milestones. If this declaration is to mean anything more than political spectacle, it must open a new phase of commitment to reducing inequality and strengthening rights-based welfare. The state must renew its focus on expanding decent employment, universal social protection, equitable access to assets and education, and participatory decision-making. Poverty eradication cannot be achieved by eliminating the poor from the survey list; it must be pursued by eliminating the conditions that produce and reproduce poverty in the first place.Kerala’s welfare legacy has long inspired the rest of India because it combined economic growth with moral purpose. That legacy must not be reduced to a managerial slogan. The challenge now is to reclaim the spirit of justice and solidarity that defined the Kerala model, and to ensure that the declaration of being “poverty-free” does not mark the end of a story, but the beginning of a deeper one.The writer is assistant professor (Economics), Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Bengaluru