What potholes say about a government’s priorities – from Kerala to New York

There is a story that, a few decades ago, used to make audiences at development conferences visibly uncomfortable. A researcher would ask: in which city is infant mortality higher – Thiruvananthapuram, capital of one of India’s poorer states, or New York City, in one of the world’s wealthiest countries?

The answer, documented by economists including Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze in their work on human development, was New York.

Kerala’s decades of public investment in health, education and women’s empowerment had produced outcomes that shamed far richer places. It was, and remains, one of the most striking arguments ever made for what committed socialist governments can do with limited means.

I was reminded of this recently – not by a seminar paper, but by potholes on the street where I live.

Some years ago, a colleague of mine from the Centre for Development Studies, who was serving as finance minister of Kerala’s Left Democratic Front government, briefly held additional charge of the Public Works Department.

He wasted no time. He put the PWD on a campaign footing: photograph every pothole, set targets, repair them fast. As a finance minister he understood the numbers, but he also understood something simpler and more powerful – that every cyclist, motorcyclist, and car driver who had learned to navigate Kerala’s cratered roads on the daily commute would immediately feel, in their bones, that the government was paying attention. The political payoff of small mercies, he knew, can be substantial.

Treating a symptom

I thought of him on April 11, when I listened to Zohran Mamdani speaking to Al Jazeera. Mamdani, of course, is the mayor of New York and arguably the second-most-prominent elected figure in the United States after the President. The subject was not foreign policy or fiscal reform. It was, importantly, about potholes.

In Mamdani’s first hundred days as mayor, his administration has filled 100,000 potholes. He was careful to give credit where it belonged: to the 300,000 municipal workers who are, in his words, the beating heart of the city.

But he was equally clear that filling potholes is only treating the symptom. His workers are now investigating the structural causes of road failure and the city plans to repave more than a thousand miles of road.

The pothole, for Mamdani, is not a trivial problem. It is a test. When citizens must navigate crumbling roads every day, their faith in the capacity of government to deliver anything – let alone the larger ambitions of a socialist programme – is quietly eroded. Fix the road and you begin to restore that faith.

Mamdani invoked a telling distinction, between what he called “sewer socialism” – the pejorative term for a left politics content to manage drains and dustbins while leaving deeper structures untouched – and what he called “sidewalk socialism”, a politics that begins with what people experience in their daily lives and uses that trust to build towards something more ambitious.

His larger programme includes taxing the wealthiest individuals and corporations to close a $5 billion budget deficit, so that the working-class people who built New York can finally afford to live in it. He aims to expand childcare and confront the housing crisis that has made the city uninhabitable for ordinary people.

But none of that, he seemed to suggest, is possible without first demonstrating that government works – that when something is broken in front of you, someone will come and fix it.

The parallel with Kerala is not accidental. Kerala’s Left built its political legitimacy over decades through exactly this combination: visible public goods – roads, schools, hospitals, ration shops – delivered with enough consistency that citizens came to believe the state was, at least partially, on their side.

The infant mortality statistic that once startled conference rooms was not a miracle. It was the cumulative result of nurses showing up, of primary health centres being staffed, of a public distribution system that functioned. The grand vision was made credible by mundane execution.

Both Kerala and New York are, in their very different ways, conducting an experiment in whether the Left can govern – not just agitate, not just critique, but actually run things. The conditions could hardly be more different: a state of 35 million people in tropical India with a long tradition of mass mobilisation, and the financial capital of the world, politically turbulent, fiscally strained, demographically fractured.

Yet the instinct is recognisably the same: start with what people walk on, drive on, live with every day. Earn the right to be heard on the harder questions.

But there is a complication closer to home, and it is one I cannot ignore. Kerala went to the polls on April 9. The Left Democratic Front is seeking a third consecutive term, a rare ambition in Indian electoral politics.

Yet its second term gave many of us pause. The government pursued infrastructure on a grand scale: six-lane highways, new ports, tourist circuits, and a quietly expanding embrace of private enterprise in health and education. These are not without merit. But they sit uneasily with the tradition of grassroots public investment that made Kerala’s development model famous in the first place – the tradition that once produced those startling infant mortality figures.

As it happens, the road next to my home was tarred a few months ago. It is already full of potholes – serious ones. I had always assumed that bad roads were a problem particular to countries like India, the price of thin budgets and thinner institutions. Learning that the richest city in the world has the same problem was, I confess, a small and somewhat rueful consolation.

The pothole outside my home is, I suspect, a small symptom of shifted priorities. When governments reach for the large and the visible – the highway interchange, the gleaming hospital-corporation – the lane outside the ordinary citizen’s home can wait.

People notice. Even those of us with a lifelong sympathy for the left, for the labouring class, for the idea that government exists to serve the many, are raising an eyebrow.

The pothole is not a trivial problem. It is a mirror.

John Kurien is a reflective development practitioner. He lives in Kozhikode.