This is what we have read, not what the state pays. Nobody has yet confirmed a Kerala figure against the national norms, and this page does not give you one. It tells you what Kerala publishes, what is in it, and what to do with that. The national cost norms that apply meanwhile are in the guides linked at the foot of this page.
Kerala State Horticulture Mission publishes a scheme details page. It carries a list of components with rates against them, and it carries no date and no order number. That is the whole problem, and it is worth walking through because the same trap has turned up in three other states we have read.
What we did
Rather than guess how old the page was, we read its figures against the national guidelines side by side. Three of them settled it:
- Rejuvenation of old orchards. Kerala's terms match paragraph 7.20 of the April 2014 national guidelines.
- Organic farming. Matches paragraph 7.30 of the same edition.
- Vermicompost units. The permanent structure's dimensions match to the inch — 30 feet by 8 feet by 2.5 feet, exactly as the 2014 annexure sets them.
Three independent matches to one edition is not coincidence. Kerala's page is a faithful copy of the national norms as they stood in April 2014, and it has not been revised since.
Why this matters more than it looks
An old page is not obviously wrong. Every line on it was correct when it was written, the components are real, the department is real, and most of the structure still stands. What has moved is the money — the national cost norms have been revised since 2014, and a plan costed against the old figures is a plan costed against numbers nobody will pay.
The same pattern turned up in Uttarakhand, where the published nursery norms match the 2014 annexure to the rupee and sit below the current national figures. In Uttarakhand's case the state's own page would have understated what a nursery could claim. That is the direction the error usually runs.
What we have not published
Kerala's rates. We have them in our own notes on the source record, and they stay there, because a figure taken from an undated page with no order behind it is not something this site will assert. We publish what a document says and name the document; there is nothing here to name.
What the Mission needs to publish is an order — a number, a date, a signature. Odisha does exactly that for its state schemes, and it is the difference between a page you can act on and a page you can only read.
What to do if you are planning in Kerala
Use the current national cost norms, which are in the guides below, for the money. Use Kerala's page for the shape — which components the Mission actually runs here, which crops it names, where the office is. Then ask the Mission, in writing, for the order that governs the component you want, and plan from that.
If you get one, tell us. An order reference from Kerala would let us publish the state's own figures properly, with a document behind them, which is what we would rather be doing.
