This article describes and analyses the ways in which public action in the State of Kerala in India helped to transform the standard of living of hired workers in agriculture. Speci?cally, the article analyses the extent of land and asset ownership, access to credit, access to social security schemes and food distribution systems and the conditions of housing and sanitation of households participating in agricultural wage work. The article is based as a case study of Morazha desam in the Malabar region of Kerala, which had one of the most oppressive agrarian systems in India before 1956–57. In 1955, another economist had studied Morazha desam; this study was conducted before one of the most important interventions through public action – land reform – took place in Malabar. The 1955 study had characterized the conditions of life of agricultural workers as ‘wretched in the extreme’. The present article documents the signi?cant transformation in the quality of life that took place in Morazha after 1955, through a weakening of the factors that led to ‘wretched’ conditions of life in the earlier period. The destruction of traditional agrarian power by the state through land reform was the most critical step in this process.