A Model of Development and its Fiscal Fallout

The story in the monograph under review begins with a reference to recurrent fiscal crisis which the Government of Kerala faced throughout the 1980s. ‘The problem got so aggravated during the Seventh Plan that in December 1987, following prolongation of its overdraft beyond the mandatory seven day limit, the Reserve Bank of India suspended treasury payments on behalf of the Government of Kerala’ (p. 1). In this monograph the author, K. K. George examines in some depth the question ‘whether there is any structural relationship between the Kerala pattern of development and the State’s perennial fiscal crisis’ (p. 2).