is the development still active
It depends, I guess.
Karma is at an "almost dead" state but there are still quite a few people who follow it, so that means something.
The coin was taken over in 2014 by a few members of the community and EastEagle has kept it on life support since. (Thanks, East and everyone!)
Although I have very little time these days and am not a developer, I am willing to invest some $ in the coin towards development over the next year, simply because of 1) the potential for a coin like this to do good things; 2) the name; 3) the community. But of course it would have to be as professional as I attempted before, and even moreso.
Karma was unique because of its vision, but in 2014 there many more transient developers and scams (and nefarious exchanges). The situation in the crypto world is less 'Wild West' now but still in early stages. The future could be bright for Karma, but this requires a small team of developers.
I envision Karma having simply one clear goal and one clear vision: to be a way to reward people on websites, starting with a Wordpress plugin that acts as a simple wallet (focusing solely on rewarding bloggers and commenters on blogs). Once we can be the default for that, there's no stopping Karma.
The wallet needs reworking, as would some of the specs. There appear to be too many coins in circulation (although I really don't think there are, since many were lost). Personally, I think there should be a 1,000,000:1 exchange, but maybe that's not a good idea.