Did I say corruption is the only issue? no.But corruption is the main issue. Competence won't get any better if corruption does't come down to "acceptable" level. The communist government and associated land reforms have a lot more do with Kerala's successes than "reduced tolerance for corruption And why did that happen? Because the land reforms were executed well.And it was executed well because system was not corrupt.People generally don't think that "let us dupe the system and get away with that".