Abstract:
Social inclusion has become a buzz word in development
discourse in recent years. The Twelfth Five Year Plan as approved by the
National Development Council has advisedly added a new chapter under
the caption social inclusion avowedly making it a national objective.
This paper tries to argue that local governments constitutionally
mandated to ‘plan for economic development and social justice’ at the
local level are eminently qualified to take up the task of working towards
this goal. Using the BPL Survey data 2009 for Kerala which was mostly
patterned on the Socio-economic and Caste Census 2011 are used to
construct an indicative model to illustrate the tremendous possibilities
that lie ahead towards achieving the goal of social inclusion in this
country.
