It's not clear what you tried to start and absent any other information your personal failure at it isn't a compelling alternative picture of the region's development to me.
I'm sure there are valid other views than the one presented in the article, I'm not saying there aren't. But as someone who doesn't know much about the region, you aren't really giving me more information about it, or giving me any reasons to take your view more seriously than the one presented in the article.
You can completely ignore what I said about my personal experience. The rest of it is still valid, and please read the child comment I posted on the same sub-thread.
Basically, Kerala exports a workforce because it can't produce or export anything else. At roughly a third of the GDP (in 2012 according to Wikipedia), it's a remittance based economy. Someone commented that remittances are a smaller part of the economy of late (and that might well be true), but in the last decade or so Kerala is also heavily in debt.
I think the main point of the opposition argument is that it's Kerala's religious demographics that led the state to be dependent on Middle Eastern remmitence. If you did a demographic survey of South Asians in the Middle East, the vast majority of them would be Muslim. It's a good way to reach a lower middle income level, but it's not achieving the type of growth needed to build industry and service.
I'm sure there are valid other views than the one presented in the article, I'm not saying there aren't. But as someone who doesn't know much about the region, you aren't really giving me more information about it, or giving me any reasons to take your view more seriously than the one presented in the article.