Has Tamil Nadu plateaued?

By The Editor

It can’t be as bad as the figures indicate

The downslide has been so fast that it is unbelievable. Exactly a year after Tamil Nadu was rated the best among Indian States in a survey done by the magazine India Today, it now ranks 20th. The sharp fall has been essentially due to its faring badly on infrastructure. While we may take such surveys with a large pinch of salt, there can be no doubt that there is plenty of scope for improvement. It is also an indicator of how fast things can change and how quickly other States are sorting out their issues. We, on the other hand, appear to be in a comfort zone that we would do well to come out of.

To quote from the survey – Tamil Nadu suffered “the steepest fall from grace since the study was first launched in 2003. The fall was scripted by the state’s abysmal performance in three categories – it dropped from top to 21st position in agriculture, from third to 13th in education and 11th to 17th in infrastructure.” There have been some consolations – on investments we have moved from 20th to 9th position. We have also moved up from 17th to 9th position on governance. On some new criteria, introduced this year, such as inclusive development, environment and cleanliness, our record is at best middling – we score respectively 21, 8 and 10.

In the light of what happened recently, any reference to the Gujarat model (suddenly discredited) would probably be met with a few laughs but as the survey credits Gujarat with being the best State overall, it would be best to know what succeeded there.

The study claims that Gujarat scored because it focused on effective last mile delivery on all counts. Does that imply Tamil Nadu failed on this score? Or is it that it is marked poorly because it already has reached a high level on most counts and so cannot move much further up?

Some of the study findings would certainly make this appear so. The state that scored highest in agriculture is Madhya Pradesh. Its success has come from effective disbursal of farm loans, a marked rise in the number of warehouses developed by Government and private agencies, and a strong distribution network. There have also been an increased number of wheat procurement centres. Does Tamil Nadu not have all this already? Likewise, in infrastructure, Assam has scored the highest with an increase in road network from 545 km in 2001 to 25,189km in 2013-14. Compare this with Tamil Nadu which has 1,99,040 km of roads already. How much more can it increase? Similarly while we agree that Tamil Nadu’s power generation and transmission capacity can do with improvement, it is not clear as to how it falls far below Assam which has a total power generation capacity of just 1,600 MW.

The section on education is far clearer. Both Goa and Kerala, two States with a high degree of literacy (and they have consistently scored higher than Tamil Nadu in the past years) continue to hold their own, chiefly on the basis of continued focus on curriculum. Tamil Nadu, it would appear, has slipped largely because of its obstinate implementation of the samacheer kalvi scheme, which, rather than improving education standards looks at how to dumb it down to the lowest common denominator. This has led to few takers for Government-run schools, which is a pity given the amount of money being spent on improving their infrastructure.

Taken overall, while we may or may not agree with the research findings, especially on the steep fall in ratings, we cannot deny that the rate of development has slowed down considerably in our State. What we have going for us is that our standards are already fairly high but we appear to have struck a plateau. Given that other states are fast catching up, we may need to introspect and set the bar higher.

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