REPORT Problems and Prospects of Mini Industrial Estates KERALA is one of the industrially backward states of India. This is primarily a result of the low priority accorded to industrial development in the first four five-year plans. The other factors arc inadequacy of resources such as capital, fossil fuels and other basic raw materials such as iron and copper. The outlay on the industrial sector in the first five plans for the state came to only about Rs 1076.6 millions out of a total ofRs. 12441.6 millions.1 This relative negligence of the industrial sector gets itself reflected in the low share it contributes towards the net state domestic product. It varied between 11.56 percent and 13.27 percent between the years 1970-71 and 1975-76. Not only is the share of industry in the net state domestic product considerably lower in Kerala than in the industrialized states, it is also lower than all-India level as can be seen from Table I. TABLE I SHARE OF I: NDUS1RY IN NET ' STATE Do?, IESTIC PROI WCT AT FA .CTOR COST State 1970-71 1911-72 1972-73 1973-74 1974-15 1915-76 Kerala 11.56 13.27 12.27 11.53 12.80 12.49 Gujarat 17.69 17.51 23.63 18.96 27.43 22.44 Karnataka 14.53 16.30 16.37 14.01 15.20 17.66 Maharashtra 26.64 27.92 28.90 25.90 26.02 25.39 Tamil Nadu 18.36 17.15 18.16 16.90 20.21 19.48 West Bengal 17.86 17.80 19.07 18.83 20.46 20.22 All-India 13.60 14.03 14.17 13.61 15.37 15.64 SOURCE: C S 0 National Accounts Statistics 1970-71—1916-17, January 1979. Kerala has been experiencing greater demographic pressure than the country as a whole during the last four to five decades. As a result of the pressure on land, the per capita availability of gross cropped area in 1975-76 was a meagre 0.12 hectare.2 In the states of Punjab and Haryana, which are primarily agrarian,