Thiruvananthapuram: Finance minister Dr T.M. Thomas Isaac will co-author a book with additional chief secretary (finance) Dr K.M. Abraham chiefly to debunk the claim that the legendary Kerala model of development is past its ‘expiry’ date. The coming together will also perhaps mark the first-ever politician-bureaucrat combination in governance literature in the country.
Titled Sustaining Kerala Model: Breaking the Fiscal Limit, the book will deal with the unorthodox economic strategies the duo will adopt not just to steer the state out of a crushing crisis but also to give a renewed thrust to the globally renowned welfare model. The title has been planned as a riposte to the 1999 book, Limits to Kerala Model of Development by Mr K.K. George that had linked the Kerala model to the fiscal crisis in the late nineties. The book will be released only by the end of this fiscal, after the two have put their ideas into practice.
Ironically, it was Dr Abraham who had handled the finances during the last two years of the UDF tenure, a time when Dr Isaac felt the state hurtled deeper into crisis. It was also Dr Abraham who was behind the figures put out by Mr K.M. Mani and then by Mr Oommen Chandy in the last two UDF budgets, numbers that were vehemently questioned by Dr Isaac.
However, Dr Isaac sweeps aside the irony with the broom of pragmatism. “He is a brilliant officer who was just trying to put a nice face on what was fundamentally ugly,” Dr Isaac said. He was especially impressed by the way Dr Abraham handled the treasury. “During the last two years I had been predicting that the treasury will shut down, but it did not. This man manoeuvred things in such a manner that the treasury stayed afloat,” Dr Isaac said. (Dr Abraham devised a sleight-of-hand mechanism called ‘ledger account’ that kept the funds within the treasury but at the same time created the illusion of the money moving out to departments and local bodies.)
Dr Isaac describes the additional chief secretary, also a chartered financial analyst, as a man of data. “He is seriously good with numbers,” he said.
