For years, Kerala's fiscal debate resembled a village festival loudspeaker. Everyone shouted, and nobody listened. While one side insisted everything was fine, the other side insisted the state was on the verge of collapse. Somewhere beneath the slogans, the accusations and the televised outrage, the actual numbers sat patiently waiting for attention.

And on June 4, those numbers finally got their turn. The fiscal status report tabled in the Assembly by the V D Satheesan government is not a thrilling read. At nearly two hundred pages, it contains neither political poetry nor ideological romance. What it does contain is something far rarer in contemporary politics. It contains arithmetic. And arithmetic, unlike political spokespersons, has no party affiliation.

The most startling revelation is not the size of Kerala's debt. It is the condition of Kerala's treasury. For much of 2024-25, the state treasury was effectively surviving on emergency support from the Reserve Bank of India.

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Negative balances became routine rather than exceptional. Kerala spent 262 days under Ways and Means Advances and another 84 days in overdraft during 2024-25, compared to just 16 days under WMA and no overdraft days in 2015-16.

A state that once went years without requiring such support now appears unable to navigate a financial year without it. That should alarm every citizen regardless of political preference. Governments can survive elections. Treasuries cannot survive arithmetic.

The report demolishes a comforting myth that has dominated public discourse for years. The problem was never merely that the Centre was unfair. The Centre may well have been unfair. Kerala's share of central taxes has indeed declined, GST compensation ended, and revenue deficit grants disappeared.

The latest Finance Commission award leaves a substantial hole in the state's projections. Yet the report shows that even while receiving ₹42,443 crore in GST compensation and ₹34,153 crore in revenue deficit grants between 2020-21 and 2023-24, a combined ₹76,596 crore, Kerala failed to correct its underlying imbalance. The transfers masked the disease. They did not cure it. Once the transfers stopped, the patient was forced to confront the diagnosis. That diagnosis is brutal.

Seventy-seven paise out of every rupee Kerala earns is consumed before a single new road is built, before a single school is improved, before a single hospital........

© Mathrubhumi English