Local Governments and the Inclusion of the Excluded: Towards a Strategic Methodology with Empirical Illustration

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.