THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Changing the nature of agricultural land would perhaps be Dr V.K. Ramachandran’s first priority as Planning Board vice chairman. "Now, land has deteriorated into a mere commodity in the state," Dr Ramachandran, who hails from Thrissur, had observed during the Kerala Study Congress held in January this year. “Even farmers find it more profitable to sell their land than cultivate it,” he said.
Some of Dr Ramachandran’s strategies to inspire farmers to not just hold on to their land but also to make it productive will be announced in the Alteration Memorandum on July 8. His wife Madhura Swaminathan is the daughter of none other than M.S. Swaminathan, the Father of India's Green Revolution. Improving rural credit would be his other big challenge, also ways to improve school education.
The paper ‘Issues in School Education in Contemporary Kerala’, which he co-wrote with economist C.P. Chandrasekhar, is considered one of the finest in the subject. An activist scholar and a trenchant critic of liberalisation, Dr Ramachandran is expected to dump the Kerala Perspective Plan 2030 evolved by the board under K.M. Chandrasekhar. During the Kerala Study Congress organised by CPM early in 2016, in which he was one of the main speakers, Dr Ramachandran had said that he had “profound differences of opinion” with the UDF’s Perspective Plan.
“He has immense grasp of Kerala issues and has written a lot about Kerala Model,” said finance minister Dr T.M. Thomas Isaac, a friend and contemporary. Dr Ramachandran, who did his under graduation in Madras Christian College, shared his class with the likes of CPM politburo member Prakash Karat and journalist N. Ram.
