By the very nature of India’s diversity, senior civil servants in our country accumulate ample experience-based knowledge that no classroom or textbook can teach. An IAS officer serving across diverse roles — district administration, policy formulation, inter-state negotiations, international forums — builds an institutional memory of extraordinary depth and range in decades of service. It is, therefore, a matter of celebration when such officers share this knowledge with the public. Among the growing body of such writings, The Kerala Club: Keepers of the Flame, edited by KM Chandrasekhar and TP Sreenivasan, stands head and shoulders above the rest — in the richness of its content, the breadth of its coverage, and the impeccable integrity of its contributors.
The volume brings together twenty-nine illuminating essays by senior officers drawn from the Indian Administrative, Foreign, Police, Forest and other central services, with Kerala as a common theme. Some were born Keralites, others were adopted by the state during their postings. This is a galaxy of administrators in the truest sense: among the contributors are those who have held the offices of national security adviser, comptroller and auditor general, cabinet secretary, G20 sherpa, chief secretary, director general of police, foreign secretary, and ambassador.
The editors, themselves distinguished in their respective careers, deserve unstinting praise for the inspired vision that conceived this project and the editorial discipline that shaped it into a coherent whole. The foreword by current Cabinet Secretary TV Somanathan provides a fitting institutional frame, reflecting on the role of the non-partisan civil service in preserving India’s democratic order, and noting that the diversity of perspectives and depth of experience this collection offers is genuinely rare. Congress MP Shashi Tharoor has rightly called it a masterclass in policymaking, and a stirring ode to one of India’s most exemplary states.
The book has an unusual and charming origin. As the editors recount in their note, it began as a WhatsApp group of retired officers with links to Kerala. The essays that emerged cover four thematic domains: Public Administration, Perspectives on Development, Local Self-Governance, and Personal Reflections — a structural choice that transforms a collection of individual memoirs into a panoramic, multi-dimensional portrait of a state and a vocation.
Part I on public administration delivers some of the volume’s most arresting material. A chapter on public policy lessons distills decades of wisdom about how decisions are actually made, unmade, and remade in the corridors of government. Another on engendering governance speaks to the distinctive contributions of women officers — how they navigated a patriarchal system and transformed it from within. A chapter on Kerala’s health paradox explains, from the inside, how a state with modest per capita income achieved health outcomes rivalling even high income nations. There are sharp reflections on the urgent need to move India’s administration from process to performance and on the imperative of attitude transformation in the civil services.
Particularly gripping is the chapter on the Mullaperiyar Dam — a 130-year-old structure made not with steel or cement but surkhi, a traditional mix of lime, jaggery and egg white. It is owned by Tamil Nadu though located in Kerala. The author, a former Kerala bureaucrat who later became a Union minister, writes that a breach in the dam could kill 3.5 million people, wash away towns including Kochi and Ernakulam, and deprive 10 million people in five Tamil Nadu districts of water. In a region where rainfall 500% of normal in one night is possible, the dam’s continued existence without an alternative is a chilling study in institutional inertia and inter-state gridlock. This chapter alone makes the book essential reading.
A frank chapter on Kerala’s trade unions charts both the historical legitimacy of labour organisations and associated costs. It is stated that white-collar workers in government offices are thoroughly unionised and the secretariat itself is no exception to work disruptions. The writing is honest, unsentimental, and ultimately constructive. The section also traces the journey of the Kerala model and how a state that till the 1960s was among India’s poorest, choreographed successive new chapters in its development saga, and the complex consequences of Kerala being nearly 88% urbanised, with all the attendant challenges of land, infrastructure and liveability.
The section on perspectives on development widens the canvas considerably. Essays on Kerala’s development model argue that it was a product of historical change dating to well before independence — a social reform movement, investment in education, and a culture of public awareness that made Kerala a lighthouse throughout. A remarkable chapter on how Kerala moved from chronic milk deficit to milk surplus illustrates the white revolution: a quiet, patient administrative collaboration with the cooperative sector that transformed an entire production structure. There are chapters on the critical importance of infrastructure investment and on Kerala’s unique pathway to human development, including the role of Gulf remittances in creating a prosperity that government policy alone could not have generated.
The part on local self-governance addresses what is perhaps Kerala’s most distinctive institutional contribution: its determined, sincere and sustained devolution of real power to Panchayati Raj institutions. Two chapters by officers who were centrally involved in Kerala’s People’s Campaign for Decentralised Planning in the 1990s offer the most honest and analytically rigorous account available of why this experiment worked where others failed — and where its weaknesses persist. This section is essential reading for anyone interested in India’s federal architecture and the conditions under which bottom-up governance can succeed.
Intimate Retrospectives
The section on personal reflections is where the book becomes most intimate and, in many ways, most memorable. There is a meticulous historical reckoning with the savage social inequities that Kerala has overcome — slavery, untouchability, caste exclusion — documented with the authority of someone who saw their residues and fought against them. One contributor traces the accidental journey of a career diplomat into educational reform.
There are poignant reflections on the extraordinary similarities found between Cambodia and Kerala, discovered by a senior officer during his ILO assignment. Most spectacular of all is the arc of a career that began as a district collector in Calicut and ascended, through a posting as tourism secretary, giving Kerala global branding of ‘God’s Own Country’, to becoming India’s G20 sherpa, delivering the landmark New Delhi Declaration. The book concludes with an essay on post-retirement life in Wayanad — working with tribal children, building laboratory infrastructure, mentoring the next generation — a quiet reminder that the best administrators never really stop serving.
What this book presents is only the tip of an iceberg. The largely unrecorded institutional knowledge that India’s retired civil servants carry represents a national resource that we are allowing to quietly dissipate. If our universities and research institutions were to attract these minds as professors of practice, they would not only enrich the education of the next generation of administrators and policymakers, but also provide intellectual scaffolding for developing, elaborating and transmitting this wisdom in socially more productive and enduring forms. Kerala, which has built much of its development story on human capital, is particularly well-positioned to exploit this potential, and The Kerala Club has shown precisely what is possible.
That said, the relatively higher efficiency and commitment to society and wholesome development of the state displayed by Kerala’s higher bureaucracy stems from the state’s political leadership. Some authors appreciate this in the book, sharing interesting anecdotes. But the state’s bureaucracy also has its failings. Despite significant digitisation of governance processes in recent years, the officialdom, especially at the middle and lower rungs, continues to retain traces of colonial-era intransigence and requires freeing from corrupt elements. Further reform of the bureaucracy must be a key feature in Kerala’s second-generation development agenda, alongside the priorities highlighted in the essays — a targeted focus on higher education, the knowledge economy, skill development and creating a critical mass of locally conducive manufacturing capacities to complement the services sector.
In the end, the book is a must-read for anyone concerned with how policies are made, how transformations are facilitated, and what it means to serve the public with intelligence and integrity.
KJ Joseph is director, Gulati Institute of Finance and Taxation, Thiruvananthapuram
The Kerala Club: Keepers of the Flame
Edited by
KM Chandrasekhar and
TP Sreenivasan
Bloomsbury India
Pp 320, Rs 799