Executive Summary

Kerala’s labour and migration economy contains an unusual coexistence: high educational attainment and persistent unemployment or underemployment among sections of the young population; large-scale international and interstate outmigration of Keralites; substantial in-migration of workers from other Indian States; a rapidly ageing population; and a large diaspora whose households continue to own, finance and maintain homes, land and enterprises in Kerala. These are commonly addressed through separate policies. The Kerala Collective for  Asset Revitalization,  Employment, and Stewardship   (K-CARES) starts from the proposition that the central development failure is partly institutional: demand, labour, assets, skills and capital exist, but are not reliably matched at the local level.

The Kerala Migration Survey (KMS) 2023 estimates 2.2 million current emigrants from Kerala, about 1.8 million return emigrants, and roughly 4 million Non-Resident Keralites when emigrants and return emigrants are combined. The survey also identified about 0.4 million cases of whole-family migration and reported that many sampled homes were locked because entire families had migrated. It estimated total remittances to Kerala at ₹216,893 crore in 2023 (GIFT & IIMAD, 2024). These findings establish the scale of migration and the possibility of absentee-household management problems; they do not establish a statewide count of vacant migrant-owned houses, unused land or assets available for commercial activation. Those quantities must be measured in a pilot baseline.

On the labour side, the Kerala Development Report 2026 reports important improvement in several labour-market indicators between 2017–18 and 2023–24, while also documenting continuing difficulties in absorbing educated labour. Urban female unemployment among those aged 15–29, for example, declined substantially but remained 37 per cent in 2023–24. The same report notes that Kerala’s service economy has become increasingly skill- and capital-intensive and therefore cannot automatically absorb additional labour (Government of Kerala, State Planning Board, 2026). The policy problem is consequently not reducible to a single unemployment rate: it involves skill–occupation matching, reservation wages, work conditions, gender constraints, geographic preferences, demand aggregation and the quality of employment.

K-CARES therefore proposes a three-layer architecture. The Gram Panchayat supplies the public trust layer—registration, verification, accreditation, coordination, grievance redressal and monitoring. A separately governed Youth Stewardship Collective (or other legally suitable collective enterprise) supplies the productive service layer. Diaspora and migrant households form the demand/asset layer, voluntarily purchasing services or offering assets for legally permissible, owner-authorised productive use. Existing institutions—NORKA and Loka Keralam Online, K-DISC/KKEM and Thozhil Sabhas, Kudumbashree, KILA, the Department of Co-operation, banks and regulated investment intermediaries—should be connected to the model instead of duplicated.

The model is deliberately inclusive of interstate migrant workers. It is not a programme to displace them. Kerala’s labour market is segmented by occupation, skills, wages, status and preferences. K-CARES should create local coordination, supervisory, technical, digital, care-navigation, enterprise and stewardship jobs while allowing qualified local and interstate workers to participate in service delivery. The objective is better organisation of differentiated human resources, not a nativist substitution strategy.

1. The Development Problem: Kerala’s Dual Migration and Matching Paradox

Kerala is simultaneously a labour-sending and labour-receiving economy. Keralites leave the State for education and work abroad and elsewhere in India, while workers from other States enter Kerala particularly for construction, manufacturing, agriculture, hospitality, services and other manual and semi-skilled occupations. Parida and Ravi Raman (2021) estimated 31.4 lakh interstate migrant workers in Kerala for 2017–18. That estimate should not be treated as a current 2026 headcount, but it establishes the structural importance of in-migration.

The coexistence of local unemployment and migrant-worker employment is not, by itself, a contradiction. Jobs are heterogeneous. Workers differ in education, expected wages, working conditions, occupational status, geographic mobility, household responsibilities and career expectations. A graduate seeking a stable professional pathway is not necessarily a ready substitute for a construction worker. K-CARES must therefore be designed around complementarity and occupational upgrading rather than an assumption that all labour is interchangeable.

Migration also generates a second mismatch. Some migrant families retain homes, land and other assets in Kerala but live at substantial distance from them. The authors’ original stewardship concept identified deterioration, maintenance, administrative coordination, elderly-parent support and underuse of land/buildings as possible consequences of absentee ownership. Its central institutional principle should be retained unchanged: the family remains the owner and decision-maker; the Panchayat becomes a trusted coordination and verification platform, not a guardian, owner or commercial manager of the asset.

A third mismatch concerns finance and local opportunity. Remittances are first and foremost household resources, not a pool that government should redirect. International experience shows that remittances are commonly used for consumption, housing, education and debt servicing, while productive investment typically requires additional financial products, trust, project pipelines and intermediation (IFAD, n.d.). K-CARES should therefore distinguish household remittance use, payment for services, philanthropy and regulated investment. No compulsory ‘channelisation’ of remittances is proposed.

2. Why K-CARES Is Needed Despite Kerala’s Existing Employment Architecture

Kerala is not institutionally empty. Indeed, the strength of existing institutions is the main reason K-CARES may be feasible. The Kerala Development Report 2026 records that KKEM’s Digital Workforce Management System had, by October 2025, registered more than 20.6 lakh job seekers and 8,239 employers, mobilised 33.7 lakh vacancies and reported 6.7 lakh facilitated employment outcomes, including 60,097 direct placements. Thozhil Sabhas identify job seekers at ward level and connect them to employment, entrepreneurship and government schemes. LSGs also host enterprise facilitation through mechanisms such as Samrambhaka Sabhas and professionally qualified interns supporting entrepreneurs (Government of Kerala, State Planning Board, 2026).

The policy gap is not absence of job-registration infrastructure. It is the absence of a systematic local mechanism that creates and aggregates a particular class of demand generated by migration: property stewardship, land management, elderly-service navigation, technical maintenance, homestay activation, climate-risk inspection, enterprise monitoring and diaspora-facing professional services. K-CARES should therefore complement KKEM/DWMS: DWMS can map and train labour supply; K-CARES creates a verified local demand pipeline.

Kudumbashree supplies a second precedent. Its network shows how local-government linkages, collective organisation, training, finance and market access can sustain community enterprises. Keralashree, documented by Kudumbashree as a linkage between job seekers/service providers from Kudumbashree families and recruiters, is especially relevant as an antecedent. The lesson is not to duplicate it, but to design interoperability and broaden the demand base to diaspora-linked stewardship and asset activation.

Haritha Karma Sena (HKS) supplies a third institutional lesson. The Kerala Development Report 2026 describes a statewide system in which locally organised workers provide a recurring household service, financed primarily through user fees and increasingly supported by a digital payment/monitoring application. K-CARES deals with very different services, but the design principle—local collective service delivery + LSG anchoring + user-payment + digital accountability—is directly relevant.

There is also a useful historical warning. OECD (2023b) records that Kerala announced in 2021 an intention to help establish 4,000 platform cooperatives for educated unemployed persons. K-CARES should not repeat a supply-first approach in which collectives are created before dependable demand is demonstrated. The pilot must validate willingness to pay, service frequency, unit economics and governance before scaling cooperative formation.

3. Institutional Proposition

Figure 1. K-CARES institutional architecture

Note. The Panchayat does not own or commercially operate private migrant assets. The productive service layer remains organisationally distinct from the public verification and grievance layer.

K-CARES is best understood as a public-interest market-making institution. In Coasean and transaction-cost terms, many potentially beneficial exchanges do not occur because the owner is distant, service quality is uncertain, local suppliers are fragmented, verification is costly and trust is weak (Coase, 1937; Williamson, 1985). The Panchayat can reduce—but should not absorb—these transaction costs. It can verify identities, publish standards, accredit providers, provide grievance channels and authenticate completed transactions. It should not set itself up as the commercial counterparty for every job.

This role can be described as the Panchayat as a ‘civic market-maker’: a democratically accountable institution that improves the conditions under which voluntary private and collective exchange can occur. Kerala’s decentralisation experience makes this more plausible than in settings where local government has little developmental capacity (Chathukulam & John, 2002, Heller et al., 2007; Isaac & Harilal, 1997). Yet this is an institutional hypothesis, not an assumption of success; capture, politicisation and administrative overload must be explicitly designed against.

4. The Three Institutional Layers

4.1 Gram Panchayat Stewardship Cell: the public trust layer

Each pilot Gram Panchayat should create a small Migrant and Community Stewardship Cell (MCSC) by resolution and under an enabling State guideline or government order, subject to legal vetting of competence under the Kerala Panchayat Raj framework. The Cell’s role is limited to registration, consent management, provider accreditation, public-service linkage, transaction verification, service-quality monitoring, emergency routing and grievance redressal.

• Maintain a minimal voluntary registry of participating migrant households and authorised local contacts.
• Verify and periodically renew the credentials of service providers and collectives.
• Publish service standards, indicative price bands where legally appropriate, complaint procedures and conflict-of-interest disclosures.
• Route public-service needs of elderly residents to existing health, social-security, disaster-management and local-government institutions rather than creating parallel services.
• Maintain an auditable digital record of requests, approvals, completion evidence, complaints and resolution times.
• Report aggregate outcomes to the Gram Sabha/Panchayat without disclosing personal or property information.

4.2 Youth Stewardship Collective: the productive enterprise layer

The productive arm should not be a Panchayat department. A pilot may use a cooperative, producer/worker collective, company, society or other form after legal and tax due diligence. The cooperative option is attractive because member ownership, democratic governance and surplus-sharing align with Kerala’s institutional tradition, while platform-cooperative experience internationally offers models for digital worker ownership (OECD, 2023a, 2023b). The exact legal form should therefore be selected after testing rather than ideologically fixed in advance.

A member enters as a Stewardship Associate, completes common training, and may specialise in a service vertical. The collective supplies common branding, scheduling, insurance arrangements, invoicing support, quality assurance, digital records, procurement and back-office services. This resembles, in limited form, the French Activity and Employment Cooperative (CAE), where prospective entrepreneurs test a business activity within a collective structure that handles administrative functions (Service Public de la République Française, 2024). K-CARES can adapt the incubation logic without copying the French legal form.

4.3 Diaspora and migrant households: the demand and asset layer

A migrant household may register a service need, not an asset transfer. It should choose the service scope, authorised persons, access conditions, spending limits and escalation procedures. A property owner may request only inspection; another may request full maintenance coordination; another may authorise a legally vetted cultivation-management arrangement. The platform should therefore be modular rather than impose a uniform stewardship package.

5. Labour-Market Operating Model: Supply and Demand Must Be Mapped Together

A core methodological innovation should be a paired Human Resource–Service Demand Census at pilot level. Conventional unemployment registration maps supply without measuring the micro-demand that can sustain paid work. K-CARES should collect the two sides simultaneously and match them at ward/Panchayat level.

The matching algorithm should not simply maximise the number of assignments. It should minimise mismatch subject to job-quality constraints: skill fit, wage acceptance, geographic distance, safety, working hours, gender preferences where legitimate (for example, client preference in personal-support contexts), provider availability and service risk. Human review should remain available for high-risk assignments.

6. Inclusion of Interstate Migrant Workers

K-CARES should explicitly reject a ‘local youth versus migrant worker’ framing. Kerala’s interstate migrant workers are part of the State’s productive economy. The collective can employ or contract verified plumbers, masons, electricians, farm workers, cleaners, drivers and technicians irrespective of State of origin, subject to labour law, occupational safety and fair-remuneration standards. Local educated youth may often add value by coordinating work, managing client communication, quality assurance, digital reporting and enterprise operations.

The model can therefore generate complementarities: a graduate steward coordinates a home restoration; a skilled interstate mason executes masonry; a local electrician handles electrical work; the client receives verified evidence; and the collective retains a transparent coordination margin. This is more economically coherent than promising to substitute graduates into occupations they may not choose.

7. Productive Activation of Land and Buildings

The authors’ original stewardship proposal correctly identifies unused agricultural land and idle buildings as possible productive assets, but this is the area where legal caution is greatest. The World Bank’s study of Kudumbashree collective farming documents how group approaches can improve access to land, credit, extension and markets, while also noting tenure-security and land-leasing constraints in Kerala (World Bank, 2021, Chathukulam & Joseph, 2026). The pilot should therefore avoid a generic promise to ‘lease migrant land’.

Instead, K-CARES should create a menu labelled Voluntary Land Activation Agreements. The menu may eventually include cultivation-management contracts, licences, legally permissible leases, revenue-sharing contracts or other instruments, but only after written legal opinions on the Kerala Land Reforms Act, registration requirements, tenancy risks, tax treatment and exit provisions. An owner’s title and possession must not be prejudiced merely by entering the platform.

The Galicia land-bank experience offers a useful conceptual analogy: a public intermediary can help match owners of underused land with users and standardise information/contracts without making ownership transfer the objective (FAO, 2022). Kerala should adapt the intermediation principle, not import the Galician legal mechanism.

8. Diaspora Finance: Separate Services, Philanthropy and Investment

K-CARES needs three clearly separated financial channels. First, a service-payment channel for household-specific services; second, a community-giving channel for voluntary philanthropy or challenge funds; and third, an investment-discovery channel for migrants interested in regulated investment opportunities. These channels should never be blurred.

Kerala already has a diaspora-governance and investment architecture. The Kerala Development Report 2026 describes NORKA, Loka Kerala Sabha, Loka Keralam Online and Overseas Keralites Investment and Holding Ltd. (OKIH) as instruments for diaspora engagement and investment facilitation. K-CARES should therefore become a Panchayat-level project-discovery and trust interface feeding into those institutions, not a competing diaspora-finance agency.

9. Digital Architecture: K-CARES Exchange

The digital platform should be transactional, consent-driven and interoperable. Its first function is not to create a comprehensive database; it is to create a reliable audit trail around a specific authorised service. Data protection should be designed around the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 and any rules/notifications in force at implementation (Government of India, 2023). A formal data-protection impact assessment should precede the pilot.

10. Financial and Business Model

Phase I should be deliberately conservative. Public funds may finance common public goods—platform development, legal design, training, accreditation, grievance systems, baseline research and independent evaluation. Recurring private services should progressively be financed by users. This allows the pilot to test whether a genuine market exists rather than masking weak demand through indefinite subsidy.

A pilot business case should calculate contribution margin per service category, utilisation of each steward, cancellation rate, customer acquisition cost, repeat-client rate, and the proportion of collective revenue arising from genuine customer payment. Employment should be counted only when paid work is actually generated. Training enrolment and platform registration are intermediate outputs, not jobs.

11. Legal and Ethical Due-Diligence Matrix

The following is a legal due-diligence agenda, not a legal opinion. Before implementation, Kerala should obtain written advice from the Law Department and specialised counsel on each domain.

The Kerala Co-operative Societies Act, 1969 provides the statutory environment for registered cooperatives, but that does not by itself establish that a particular K-CARES activity can or should be constituted under the Act. Similarly, the Kerala Panchayat Raj Act establishes local-government functions, but the precise scope for a Panchayat to coordinate paid private stewardship must be examined before launch. The policy paper therefore intentionally separates a desirable institutional function from the final legal vehicle.

12. Governance and Capture Prevention

The highest institutional risk is that K-CARES becomes a patronage channel: membership or jobs allocated politically, preferred contractors protected, prices obscured, or private property information accessed without need. Governance should make such capture difficult rather than rely on goodwill.

• Open, published eligibility criteria for providers and collective membership; reasons recorded for rejection/suspension.
• Digital declaration of conflict of interest for elected functionaries, staff, committee members and provider-selection personnel.
• Client choice among accredited providers for ordinary jobs; competitive quotations above a defined value threshold.
• Separation of platform administration, provider execution, payment custody and complaint adjudication wherever practicable.
• Quarterly aggregate transparency dashboard without exposing personal/property data.
• Independent social/financial/technology audit during pilot; random service-quality verification.
• Time-bound grievance and appeal mechanism with an external escalation channel at district/state level.
• No exclusivity: a migrant household remains free to use any lawful provider outside K-CARES.

13. Pilot Design

The authors’ original concept proposed 10–15 Gram Panchayats in Kottayam and Pathanamthitta. That remains a sensible starting geography because the design can be tested in locations with established migration histories, but selection should be evidence-based rather than reputational. Panchayats should be stratified by migration exposure, ageing, rural–urban character, agricultural land use, collective capacity and administrative readiness. Pilot eligibility should require a Panchayat resolution and a minimum governance/readiness score.

14. Baseline Research Package

The pilot should begin as a research exercise. The most valuable contribution may be the first Panchayat-level evidence on the migration-generated local service economy. Four linked instruments are recommended.

1.  Diaspora household survey: current property-management arrangements, service problems, costs, trust, willingness to pay, elder-support needs, asset-activation interest and investment interest (separately measured).

2. Youth and worker survey: qualifications, employment history, skills, occupational preferences, reservation wages, time/location constraints, entrepreneurship interest, migration intentions and training needs.

3.  Asset/service inventory: only with owner consent—property type, current use, maintenance frequency, land status, existing contracts, legal constraints and potential service categories. This is not a cadastral survey.

4. Provider and institutional mapping: existing plumbers/electricians/builders/farmers/care organisations/Kudumbashree enterprises/interstate-worker networks, prices, capacities, licenses, insurance and geographic coverage.

15. KPI Dashboard and Evaluation Strategy

A stepped or phased rollout is preferable to simultaneous Statewide launch. Where feasible, comparable Panchayats that enter later can serve as a counterfactual for selected outcomes. Because households self-select into stewardship, household-level causal estimates will require careful matching or quasi-experimental design. The evaluation should therefore combine administrative transaction data, baseline/end-line surveys, qualitative process tracing and cost analysis rather than claim causal impacts from before–after counts alone.

16. Risk Register

17. Institutional Convergence Map

18. What Would Make K-CARES Transformative?

K-CARES will not be transformative merely because it has a portal, a new acronym or a State launch. Its transformative potential lies in changing the unit of employment policy. Instead of treating the unemployed person as the isolated policy object, it treats the local transaction system as the object of reform: who needs a service, who can provide it, what asset is idle, why the exchange does not occur, what trust is missing, who bears risk, how payment is verified, and how a worker can graduate into an enterprise.

The model would be successful if it demonstrates five things simultaneously: (1) diaspora households voluntarily pay for verified services; (2) those payments generate decent, sustained local earnings; (3) the Panchayat can reduce trust/transaction costs without taking over commercial functions; (4) previously underused assets can be activated without weakening property rights; and (5) existing Kerala institutions can converge around the model instead of creating another silo.

This is also why K-CARES should be framed as a development institution rather than an NRI property-care scheme. Property stewardship is the initial demand anchor. The deeper purpose is local economic regeneration: creating a pipeline of service enterprises, enabling women and educated youth to work closer to home, professionalising household and community services, complementing migrant labour, and creating regulated pathways by which diaspora knowledge and investment can connect to credible local projects.

19. Immediate Decision Agenda for a Kerala Policy Roundtable

1.  Agree the problem statement and reject unsupported statewide estimates of vacant houses, idle migrant land and job potential.

2.  Constitute a small interdisciplinary design group: LSGD, NORKA, K-DISC/KKEM, Kudumbashree, Co-operation, Law, Agriculture, Social Justice/elder care, data-protection/cybersecurity, labour, finance, Panchayat elected functionaries and researchers.

3.  Commission a 60–90 day legal feasibility note and pilot protocol before announcing a scheme.

4.  Select 10–15 candidate Panchayats using explicit migration/ageing/administrative-readiness criteria; undertake baseline and market validation before forming large collectives.

5.  Build the first K-CARES module around low-risk, clearly paid services: property inspection, maintenance coordination, gardening, digital/professional assistance, non-clinical elder navigation and climate-readiness checks.

6.  Integrate labour supply from Thozhil Sabhas/KKEM rather than create a duplicate unemployment registry.

7.  Use NORKA/Loka Keralam for diaspora outreach and OKIH/regulated institutions for investment—never pool diaspora funds in a Panchayat platform.

8.  Pre-register evaluation indicators and publish a 12-month pilot report, including failures and complaints, before any Statewide expansion.

Annex 1. Minimum Pilot Data Dictionary

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