Developing Tamil Nadu
“If the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) comes to power, it will ruin the developed State of Tamil Nadu” — Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin said this in his address to a local conference organised by the Indian Union Muslim League in Kumbakonam on January 28.
While Stalin’s claim relies on aggregate metrics like the GSDP and the GER, economic development is really a culture. True development means rising incomes as well as expanded human freedoms and better quality of social systems — which are areas where Tamil Nadu still faces an uphill task. For instance while the DMK government launched ambitious initiatives like the ‘Green Tamil Nadu Mission’ and the ‘Tamil Nadu Climate Change Mission’, enforcement on the ground remains reactive. The State Pollution Control Board suffers from regulatory capture and its focus is on granting clearances to aid industrial GSDP growth rather than penalising non-compliance.
Pollution hotspots like Ennore and the Cooum River have seen little qualitative improvement in water and air quality indices despite four years of rhetoric. A culture of development would require TN to shift from managing pollution, e.g. clearing oil spills after they happen, to preventing it through strict liability, which the state has been reluctant to enforce to avoid spooking investors.
In fact noise pollution has become so pervasive that most residents have simply become accustomed to it. After I lodged a complaint with the SPCB over an offender in my neighbourhood last year, an official from the board reached out just to say, “That’s how it is, there is nothing we can do.”
The Dravidian Model is often lauded for high access to education, as seen for example by the high gross enrollment ratio, but what of learning outcomes and employability? The need for the ‘Naan Mudhalvan’ scheme Stalin launched in 2022 is itself an admission of systemic failure: it acknowledged that most of the engineering and arts graduates the state produces are unemployable sans remedial skilling. Similarly a developed state wouldn’t just have children in school, it would have them performing at global standards, yet Tamil Nadu's public education system still struggles to compete with private counterparts.
But perhaps the strongest reason to disagree with Stalin’s ‘developed’ tag for Tamil Nadu is the persistence of caste-based atrocities, which points to a failure in social development. The 2022 incident in Vengaivayal, where human faeces were found in a water tank meant for Scheduled Caste residents, comes to mind, as does the inability of the state apparatus to swiftly identify and punish the perpetrators. Sociologists have argued that economic growth without eradicating caste spatiality is incomplete modernisation, so not being able to swiftly deliver justice in such a high-profile case undermines the claim that TN offers a “safe” or “developed” social environment for minorities and marginalised groups.
Finally, even from a fiscal standpoint, a ‘developed’ economy should run on sustainable revenue models rather than consumption funded by debt. According to recent CAG reports and fiscal analyses (2023-2024), Tamil Nadu continues to run a revenue deficit, meaning the government is borrowing money just to pay for daily expenses such as salaries and subsidies rather than investing in capital assets. The current administration has also doubled down on populist welfare, including cash transfers, without fixing the structural revenue leaks, e.g. electricity board losses, creating a sort of fragile development where the state is one or two fiscal shocks away from crisis. Truly developed economies on the other hand maintain revenue surpluses to fund welfare.
I’m rooting for the DMK to win the impending Assembly elections, which is why I’m concerned that by engrossing the anti-Hindutva space while leaving socio-economic fractures unhealed, comments like Stalin's may till the soil for the very ideology his party claims to resist — by pushing groups that remain disenfranchised despite claims to development to seek solutions in the opposition's counter-narratives.
