Glossary

Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited. An oil company majority-owned by the Union government; it runs the refinery at Kochi.

Comptroller and Auditor General of India. The constitutional auditor of government accounts, whose reports on Keralam are laid before the state legislature and set out what its audits found.

Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority. Holds money paid by anyone diverting forest land, to be spent planting replacement forest.

Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, headquartered in Kochi. A national marine research laboratory under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research.

Singapore’s Economic Development Board. The agency that plans and recruits the industries Singapore decides to build.

The series uses it as a comparator for deliberate industrial selection: the EDB chooses sectors and then assembles land, training and tenants around them, rather than offering incentives and waiting to see who arrives.

ETH Zurich, the Swiss federal technical university. Used in the series as a model of a research institution anchoring an industrial region.

Floor area ratio. The total floor space a building may have relative to the size of its plot, and the main lever by which a city controls density.

One of Singapore’s two sovereign wealth funds, which invests the state’s reserves abroad.

Indian Rare Earths Limited. A Government of India enterprise, under the Department of Atomic Energy since 1963, which mines and processes the mineral sands on the Kerala coast.

Singapore’s industrial land developer, which builds and manages estates such as Jurong Island.

Kerala Industrial Infrastructure Development Corporation. The state body that builds and runs industrial parks.

Distinct from Kerala IT Mission, which runs the Technopark and Infopark campuses. Essays in this series treat the two as separate instruments because they are: one develops land and shared industrial infrastructure, the other operates technology campuses.

Kerala State Higher Education Council. The body advising the state on university policy and reform.

National Institutional Ranking Framework. The Indian government’s official ranking of universities and colleges.

Net State Domestic Product. A state’s economic output after depreciation, the state-level counterpart to national income.

The elected local government of a village or group of villages, and the lowest tier of India’s three-tier local government.

Kerala devolved unusually large budgets and functions to this tier after 1996, which is why the series treats local bodies as a real instrument of state capacity rather than an administrative formality.

Periodic Labour Force Survey. India’s official household survey of employment and unemployment, conducted by the National Statistical Office.

Money sent home by workers living abroad. For Kerala this has been a larger and steadier inflow than most of the state’s own revenue.

Patches of stunted evergreen forest in the folds of the high Western Ghats, interleaved with grassland. Slow-growing and effectively unrecoverable once cleared.

United Nations Population Fund. The UN agency whose population figures the state's Economic Review cites for Keralam's share of people aged sixty and above.