On 1 November 2025, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM) announced that the state of Kerala is “extreme poverty–free” — one year ahead of schedule. It is the only state to achieve this milestone in a country with the largest population living in extreme poverty in the world.

The Extreme Poverty Eradication Project (EPEP) represents a historic victory for the people of Kerala. The southwestern Indian state has long been among the country’s poorest. In the 1970s and 1980s, incomes in Kerala were roughly two-thirds of the national average. In the 2000s, incomes in the state surged ahead of the rest of India and, by 2022, they were over fifty percent higher. In mere decades, Kerala had become one of India’s wealthiest states.

The completion of the EPEP is a major victory for the CPIM — and a testament of the strength of its organization. Announced in 2021, the project began with an exhaustive door-to-door survey led by local self-governments and community organisations like Kudumbashree, a women’s cooperative network with over four million members.

They identified 64,006 households, comprising roughly 103,000 individuals, who continued to live in conditions of “extreme deprivation.” For each, local assemblies drafted a micro-plan detailing the specific interventions required — housing, healthcare, employment, land titles, pensions, or access to social protections. Unlike top-down welfare schemes, these were participatory blueprints that took shape in the wards and panchayats, ensuring no one was left out of the process that determined their own future.

“This historic initiative was launched by involving people from all sections of society and incorporating ideas that emerged from their participation and feedback,” Chief Minister Vijayan said. “The extreme poverty eradication process is a continuation of earlier efforts such as the universalization of the Public Distribution System and initiatives to eliminate landlessness and homelessness.”

The elimination of extreme poverty is part of a much longer trajectory of socialist construction in Kerala, which began with radical land reforms instituted by communist forces in the late 1960s. These policies expropriated private land and redistributed it to landless workers, laying the foundations for Kerala’s remarkable social indicators: near-universal literacy, one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the Global South, and the highest life expectancy in India.

Kerala’s success in eliminating extreme poverty is also a victory for the world communist movement, which has made historic strides in improving standards of living. In February 2021, China became the first country in the world to end extreme poverty, having lifted the country’s remaining 98.99 million people out of absolute poverty a decade ahead of schedule. Vietnam, which achieved stunning results in its poverty-alleviation efforts, aims to end extreme poverty entirely by 2030.

Kerala’s victory stands in stark contrast to the picture in other parts of the country. Across India, inequality has reached record highs; the richest 1% now own more than 70% of the wealth. Millions remain malnourished, jobless, and debt-ridden, while the central government cuts public spending and privatizes essential services.

Similarly, the successes in socialist governance elsewhere represent a major departure from the global norm. Humanity faces extreme and deepening deprivation all around the world. Today, over two billion people face food insecurity. Over three billion people do not have access to a cooking stove. Nearly four billion people do not have safe sanitation facilities, and as many as five billion lack access to basic health services.

This extreme hardship is a catastrophe in the Global South, but it increasingly affects those living in the imperial metropoles, too. According to Oxfam, over 40% of the US population — including 48.9% of children — lived in poverty in 2024. These numbers are on the rise as the capitalist ruling class appropriates ever greater shares of global wealth.

The state of Kerala shows what socialists have long known to be true: that the solutions to poverty exist, that they are reasonably straightforward to implement, and that the only thing holding them back is capitalism’s unquenchable thirst for profit.

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