Preliminary note; do not cite or quote Public Action for Socioeconomic Security: A Note on the Case of Dalit Households in a Village in Kerala, India R. Ramakumar 1 __________________________________________________________________ When people’s livelihoods are deeply compromised,…human security contracts. People eat less and some starve (Commission on Human Security, 2003, p. 73). INTRODUCTION The concept of human security, which initially encompassed aspects of physical security alone, has over time evolved into a much broader concept. Following Amartya Sen, it has been argued that “human security at its core requires a set of vital freedoms for everyone” (CHS, 2003, p, 73). The analysis of the CHS on what these freedoms mean is illuminating: “besides basic income and resources, the freedoms to enjoy basic health, basic education, shelter, physical safety, and access to clean water and clean air are vitally important” (ibid.) Historical experience shows that the expansion of freedoms of discriminated and dispossessed people has required significant public action. By definition, public action refers not only to the activities of the state, but also the “social actions taken by members of the public”, which are both “collaborative”, through “civic co-operation”, and “adversarial”, through “political opposition and social criticism” (Dreze and Sen 1989, vii). In the framework of the Dreze and Sen definition, public action includes actions from above (actions of the state) and below (actions of class and mass organizations, political parties, individuals and non-governmental groups). The overall development experience of the State of Kerala in India is widely documented in the literature (Centre for Development Studies, 1975; Ramachandran, 1996). The key feature of the development experience of Kerala is the achievement of high levels of social indicators even while per capita incomes were low. 2 The most important lesson that development economists have drawn from Kerala ’s development experience is that the attainment of high levels of social indicators need not wait till an economy generates adequate resources through economic growth to finance programmes for social development (Sen 1990). Kerala ’s development achievements were mainly the result of public action over many years (Ramachandran 1996). In this note, I intend to explore the relationship between public action and the transformation of socioeconomic security of one of the most oppressed sections of Indian society – the Dalits – in Kerala. Specifically, the note analyses changes in land ownership, 1 Assistant Professor, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai – 400 088, India. Email: rr@tiss.edu. 2 Kerala’s life expectancy at birth is 70.4 years for women, infant mortality rate is 14 per 1000 live births and literacy rate among women above the age of seven is 88 per cent (GoK 2004). Respectively, the corresponding figures for India as a whole are 61 years, 66 per 1000 live births and 52 per cent (GoI 2004). The median number of years of schooling of rural men and women in Kerala was 7.8 and 7.4 respectively in 1999, while the corresponding figures for India were 4.6 and 0 (Chandrasekhar, Ramachandran and Ramakumar 2001).