The mandate is in. Now begins work of building the Kerala our young people deserve

On 4 May, the people of Kerala delivered a clear and unsparing verdict. The LDF was decisively rejected, reduced from 99 seats to 35, with thirteen of its ministers losing. The UDF was returned with 102 seats — a historic mandate. And the Bharatiya Janata Party, for the first time in our state's history, won three assembly seats. I have the privilege of being one of those three, sent to the Kerala Legislative Assembly by the people of Nemom.

I do not write this as a victory note. The opposite. The verdict was not a destination. It was a permission slip to begin the real work.

Because beneath the seat counts, the result said something far more important about Kerala — something I heard at every doorstep, from Nemom to Nilambur. It said that Malayalees are no longer willing to vote on inherited loyalty alone. They have started voting on performance. They have started asking, in the simplest possible terms, what did you actually do for me — and for my children?

That question now belongs to all of us in public life. It belongs to the new UDF government, which has every advantage to deliver. It belongs to my colleagues and me in the opposition, whose job is now to push, to scrutinise, and to build. And it belongs, most of all, to the young Malayali who has spent the last decade quietly losing faith that this state had anything left to offer her.

The verdict, in one sentence: our young people are out of patience

Every Malayali family I met during the campaign had the same story. A son in Dubai. A daughter in Toronto. A nephew in Melbourne who has already decided he isn't coming back. We say it with pride — "my children are doing well abroad" — and we don't always notice the quiet grief underneath. Two-point-two million of our young people have emigrated, according to the Kerala Migration Survey. Another half a million have moved to other states. Youth unemployment in Kerala (ages 15–29) stands at 29.9% — nearly three times the national average. For young Malayali women, it is 47.1%. Almost one in two.

The 4 May verdict was, more than anything, those numbers speaking through the ballot box. People did not punish the previous government because it was left-wing. They punished it because it had stopped delivering on the question that matters most to a 24-year-old in Kollam — will there be a future for me here?

Be honest about what we got right — and what we still get wrong

Kerala did extraordinary things in the twentieth century. We made literacy near-universal when most of India was still negotiating with it. We built a healthcare system that other states still come to study. Our women live longer, our children are healthier, and our human-development indicators sit alongside middle-income countries.

But human-development success without economic opportunity is a slow tragedy. We taught a generation to read, write, code and think — and then asked them to leave the state to use those skills. That is not a model. It is a leak.

For too long, governments across fronts have presided over an economic culture that punishes risk, suspects business, slows projects to a crawl, and chases capital away. The cost has been paid for flight tickets out of Thiruvananthapuram and Kochi every single day. That cost is what the 2026 verdict finally put a price on.

A ten-year horizon — what the new government must deliver, and what we will push for

I will not waste this term on rhetoric. As MLA from Nemom and as President of the BJP in Kerala, here is what I will spend the next five years working towards — and what I will, from the opposition benches, demand of the new government every day.

One: make Kerala the easiest state in India to start something in. A young engineer with an idea should be able to register a company in a day, get all clearances in a month, and access early capital in a quarter. Kerala already has more than 3,500 active startups and an ecosystem that grew at one of the fastest rates in the world over the last three years. The system around the entrepreneur, however, remains hostile. That has to end.

Two: Triple Technopark — and build a credible innovation hub in every district. Technopark, Infopark and Cyberpark together employ around 1.5 lakh professionals across more than 450 companies. Kerala's IT exports are approaching ₹1 lakh crore, up from ₹34,000 crore a decade ago. Imagine if every district had a hub of its own — not as a press release, but as a real place where a young person from Kasaragod or Kollam can build a global product without buying a ticket out. The reason this has not happened is not technological. It is political.

Three: Skill our youth for the world economy and let them work in it from Kerala. AI, biotech, fintech, semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, green energy. India will be central to many of these over the next decade. As Union Minister of State for Skill Development, Entrepreneurship and Electronics & IT, I saw what is possible at the national scale — and how much we have been leaving on the table in Kerala. Our young people should not need a Singapore visa to earn a Singapore salary.

Four: Infrastructure built like we mean it. Ports, airports, expressways, public transport, fibre, reliable power, water. Other states are racing. Kerala has spent two decades blocking projects in committees. Tourism, logistics, healthcare, knowledge industries and agri-value chains all rest on infrastructure we have under-built. The next ten years must be about delivery, not debate.

Five: A government that gets out of the way. Faster clearances. Honest cooperative banks. A police and bureaucracy that protects investors and entrepreneurs instead of harassing them. Lower friction, lower rent-seeking, a smaller and smarter state. Less performance of governance, more actual governance.

To Kerala's young people: this verdict was for you

I want to say something directly to the young Malayali reading this — in a hostel in Kottayam, on a metro in Bengaluru, in a kitchen in Sharjah, at a desk in Toronto.

You did this. Whether or not you voted, whether you were even in the state on counting day, the conversation at every kitchen table in Kerala for the past year was about you. About why you left. About what would make you stay. About what your parents and grandparents had failed to build for you.

The new government has the mandate and the responsibility to deliver. We — the three of us in the BJP, and the larger NDA — will hold them to it, every single day. But our job does not end with opposition. Our job is also to build, district by district, the political alternative that puts your future at the centre of every decision. That is the work I have signed up for in the assembly. That is the work the people of Nemom sent me to do.

I will not insult your intelligence by promising that change is quick, or that any one government can fix in five years what was bent over fifty. But I will promise this. I will spend every day of the term you have given me trying to build a Kerala that earns the right to ask you to stay. A Kerala that does not export its talent because it failed to use it.

That is the work. Viksit Keralam is not a slogan. It is a debt we owe the generation we have spent so much time educating and so little time employing.

The decade ahead belongs to them. The 4 May mandate was only the beginning. Let us not waste it.

________________________________________

Rajeev Chandrasekhar is the MLA from Nemom, President of the Bharatiya Janata Party — Kerala, and former Union Minister of State for Skill Development, Entrepreneurship, Electronics & Information Technology. Data cited from the Kerala Migration Survey (2023), the Periodic Labour Force Survey, Kerala Startup Mission, and the Kerala IT department.