Alcove

Science, culture, complexity

Tag: Tamil Nadu

  • State and crime

    From ‘The Sulur horror story of child sexual assault and murder’, The Hindu, May 31, 2026:

    The abduction, sexual assault, and murder of the girl sent shock waves across Tamil Nadu, coming as it did immediately after the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) came to power with C. Joseph Vijay as the Chief Minister. The heinous crime also became a dark spot in the early days of the TVK government as Mr. Vijay had targeted the previous DMK government vehemently during his election campaign over crimes against women and children.

    Mr. Vijay, who sent Director-General of Police Sandeep Rai Rathore and Additional DGP (Law and Order) Maheshwar Dayal to Coimbatore after the crime, said the murder had caused immense pain and shock. …

    Leader of the Opposition Udhayanidhi Stalin alleged that 30 major incidents of crime, including the murder of the girl, were reported within 12 days of Mr. Vijay assuming office, casting serious doubts about the State’s law and order situation. AIADMK general secretary Edappadi K. Palaniswami accused the government of not taking swift action after receiving a complaint about the girl’s disappearance.

    Udhayanidhi’s criticism seems misguided. A single murder, however horrific, is not a good basis on which to judge the State’s overall law and order situation or the safety of women and girls. Whether a crime occurred says nothing about law and order because serious crimes occur in every society, including those with highly capable police forces and governments. The more meaningful questions are whether crime rates are falling, whether the State can prevent foreseeable risks, how quickly it responds when a serious crime does occur, how effectively it investigates them, and whether the perpetrators are punished. A good law and order apparatus could never promise to prevent crime.

    It is even more absurd that Tamil Nadu’s law and order situation deteriorated within 12 days of a new government taking office — when it will have had little time to review and institute changes (as necessary) to policing, prosecution, the administration of criminal justice, urban planning, social services, and the many other factors that influence crime. In fact, one crime committed shortly after an election almost certainly originated in conditions that predated that government. In fact, the risk of sexual violence — as at Sulur — at large also depends on several factors, including the offender’s behaviour, family and neighbourhood networks, policing practices, urban design, alcohol use, social norms, reporting rates, court effectiveness, school systems, and — like it or not — sheer chance.

    No chief minister who has been in power for just under a fortnight can directly control these factors on a daily basis. This individual can effectively influence how the State reacts to crime, much less so whether a particular crime occurs. But over five years, a State government — like the one Udhayanidhi was until recently part of — can matter substantially because they can hire more police officers, improve the State’s forensic capacity, expand CCTV coverage, redesign unsafe public spaces, strengthen survivor support services, accelerate trials, improve conviction rates, regulate alcohol sales, improve public transport safety, and invest in education and social welfare.

    Yet again, even if these changes can alter the probability that such crimes occur and the likelihood that offenders are caught and punished, these changes will not eliminate crimes against women and girls with certainty. But even more: a government should be judged less by a handful of shocking cases than by long-term trends. If crimes against women, child sexual offences, murder rates, conviction rates, response times, and public perceptions of safety improve (or do not) over several years, then it is reasonable to attribute some responsibility to the government. Otherwise, it is just bickering.

    Featured image credit: Joshua Coleman/Unsplash.

  • ‘Hidden’ voting preferences

    On May 4, former Tamil film actor C. Joseph Vijay and his Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) emerged in the Tamil Nadu Assembly elections as the single largest party. The magnitude of the victory was widely unexpected, and dislodged the Dravidian duopoly in the State since 1959.

    While the reasons for this win are still falling in place — a need for change and reform and fatigue with corruption seem to have been decisive forces — it also appears more than a few voters expected the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) to win even as they wished to shrink the size of its majority, to send a message of sorts.

    Eventually, of course, the TVK won, securing 108 seats in the 234-seat Assembly and with almost 35% of the vote share.

    A rational choice

    While the complete political psychology of Mr. Vijay’s win is still developing, we know the TVK did subtract more from the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam vote base. The erstwhile actor also had many vocal supporters, especially among the State’s youth. Many parents were even cowed by their starstruck and adamant children, often well below voting age, insisting they vote for the TVK irrespective of their own inclinations.

    In the mix of possibilities, the idea that one would vote for another party assuming a second party would win anyway stands out as a self-negating, even unpredictable, proposition.

    However, this way of deciding is actually rational and well-documented in political science and economics. The basic idea comes from the fact that people do not just vote for whom or which ideology they prefer. They also vote based on whom they believe ‘can’ win, how they believe others will vote, and what social rewards (or punishments) they associate with each choice. As a result, if voters believe one party is ‘destined’ to win, they could also believe they can defect to another party — i.e. voting for different reasons while not changing their expectations. When that idea becomes sufficiently widespread, the party they actually voted for could win.

    Of course, psychology alone cannot explain what happened in Tamil Nadu. But the way psychologists, sociologists, and economists have explored these possibilities may describe a part of why the State voted the way it did.

    Mediated by the media

    In the 1920s, the U.S. social psychologist Floyd Allport described a concept called pluralistic ignorance. It says that if each person in a group privately believes something but incorrectly assumes most other people do not believe that as well, they can behave on the basis of a collective opinion that they have failed to read. Scholars have also found that any society whose people think like this is actually less stable than it looks. When private preferences diverge far enough from the public one, even a small trigger — like a rupture in the appearance of consensus — can cause people to quickly and progressively reveal their true choices as they see others doing so.

    The TVK’s 34.92% vote share could suggest a reservoir of suppressed private preferences that did not always surface in mainstream discourse — or could it? Since the verdict on May 4, many reporters have recalled people on the ground telling them they would vote for the TVK — even as many in the media reported the DMK would emerge victorious.

    They may have struggled to reconcile two conflicting impressions. On the one hand, they encountered enthusiasm for a two-year-old party and its charismatic leader. On the other, they weighed the DMK’s formidable organisational machinery and its entrenched presence in Tamil Nadu politics, plus the common assumption that parties with deep cadres and alliances generally prevail. Many observers may have resolved this contradiction in favour of what they already ‘knew’ about how elections usually work. After all, if such intuitions prove unreliable in one major election, they could unsettle the observers’ confidence in others as well.

    Ultimately, those declarations in the press supporting a DMK victory could also have lowered the perceived cost of voting for an alternative. In Tamil Nadu, one popular media narrative of the TVK — that it was a celebrity vanity project, different in spirit from the campaigns of M.G. Ramachandran and J. Jayalalithaa — could also have made Mr. Vijay et al. seem like an alternative through whose bid to power individual voters could send a ‘message’.

    Diverging preferences

    Voters do not always infer information directly. They also survey the (apparent) behaviour of others. Each voter’s confidence in the DMK’s invincibility could have been abetted partly by observing what seemed to be confidence among others, leading some people to discount their own private impressions. This then could have created a feed-forward loop in which the strength of the private preference diverges significantly from that of the public one, until a voter reaches the ballot.

    Scholars have sometimes modelled this as a phenomenon called a threshold effect: each voter has a personal point at which they will act on their private preference. When enough people cross that threshold at the same time, the electoral outcome can shift nonlinearly, meaning it could appear sudden and disproportionate to what people have been seeing around them until then.

    In a 1995 book titled Private Truths, Public Lies, the Turkish-American economist Timur Kuran argued that individuals routinely misrepresent their private preferences in order to conform with public preferences, which he called preference falsification. And as falsified preferences accumulate over time, they could stabilise a misleading public consensus.

    The political scientist Anthony Downs helped put together a rational explanation of voting in which people weigh the expected value of their vote, including the small chance that it could be decisive. In a political climate where the DMK’s victory could have seemed like a given, for example, voters might try to improve the value of their vote, as they see it. Based on this idea, around three decades later, Australian economist Geoffrey Brennan and his American peer Loren Lomasky argued that because the chance of any one vote being pivotal is really small in a large election, voters also use the (private) ballot as a place where they can express themselves — an interpretation some scholars have also applied to the Brexit referendum.

    Defect without consequence

    In fact, the duo contended that the lower a person perceives the value of their vote to be, the more sincerely they will vote for whom they actually want to vote for. In this reading, some of TVK’s voters could be said to have voted expressively. Some scholars have described similar situations in terms of the ‘wasted vote’ — in Tamil Nadu, not wasted because it went to the TVK but because it would have been of ‘little use’ to the DMK.

    In his noted work on public goods and collective action, the economist Mancur Olson found that individuals who are all interested in a common collective good will still also under-contribute towards the goal as long as they can benefit from the contributions of others. So for instance, if a group of DMK supporters believed that the DMK was set to win, one individual in the group may have also believed that as long as the others voted for the DMK, she alone could vote to ‘send a message’ without consequence. The defector’s decision is actually rational because, according to the information that she had, the cost of defection was zero.

    As analysts continue to make sense of the TVK’s unprecedented victory, it will be interesting to watch whether any of these reasons match what played out on the ground on April 23.

  • 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.

  • The hidden heatwave

    A heatwave is like the COVID-19 virus. During the pandemic, the virus infected and killed many people. When vaccines became available, the mortality rate dropped even though the virus continued to spread. But vaccines weren’t the only way to keep people from dying. The COVID-19 virus killed more people if the people were already unhealthy

    In India, an important cause for people being unhealthy is the state itself. In many places, the roads are poorly laid, kicking dust exposed by traffic use up into the air, where it joins the PM2.5 particles emitted by industrial facilities allowed to set up shop near residential and commercial areas without proper emission controls. If this is one extreme, becauses these experiences are so common for so many Indians, at the other is the state’s apathy towards public health. India’s doctor-to-patient ratio is dismal; hospitals are understaffed and under-equipped; drug quality is so uneven as to be a gamble; insurance coverage is iffy and unclear; privatisation is increasing; and the national government’s financial contribution towards public health is in free fall.

    For these reasons as well, and not just because of vaccine availability or coverage, the COVID-19 virus killed more people than it should have been able to. A person’s vulnerability to this or any other infection is thus determined by their well-being — which is affected both by explicit factors like a new pathogen in the population and implicit factors like the quality of healthcare they have been able to access.

    A heatwave resembles the virus for the same reason: a person’s vulnerability to high heat is determined by their well-being — which in turn is affected by the amount of ambient heat and relative humidity as well as the extent to which they are able to evade the effects of that combination. This weekend, a new investigative effort by a team of journalists at The Hindu (including me) has reported just this fact, but for the first time with ground-zero details that people in general, and perhaps even the Tamil Nadu government itself, have thus far only presumed to be the case. Read it online, in the e-paper or in today’s newspaper.

    The fundamental issues are two-pronged. First, Tamil Nadu’s policies on protecting people during heatwaves require the weather department to have declared a heatwave to apply. Second, even when there is no heatwave, many people but especially the poorer consistently suffer heatwave conditions. (Note: I’m criticising Tamil Nadu here because it’s my state of residence and equally because it’s one of a few states actually paying as much attention to economic growth as it is to public health, of which heat safety is an important part.)

    The net effect is for people to suffer their private but nonetheless very real heatwave conditions without enjoying the support the state has promised for people in these conditions. The criticism also indicts the state for falling short on enforcing other heat-related policies that leave the vulnerable even more stranded.

    The corresponding measures include (i) access to clean toilets, a lack of which forces people — but especially women, who can’t urinate in public the way men are known to — to drink less water and suppress their urges to urinate, risking urinary tract infections; (ii) access to clean and cool drinking water, a paucity of which forces people to pay out of their pockets to buy chilled water or beverages, reducing the amount of money they have left for medical expenses as well as risking the ill health that comes with consuming aerated and/or sugary beverages; and (ii) state-built quarters that pay meaningful attention to ventilating living spaces, which when skipped exposes people to humidity levels that prevent their bodies from cooling by sweating, rendering them more susceptible to heat-related illnesses.

    And as The Hindu team revealed, these forms of suffering are already playing out.

    The India Meteorological Department defines a heatwave based on how much the temperature deviates from a historical average. But this is a strictly meteorological definition that doesn’t account for the way class differences create heatwave-like conditions. These conditions kick in as a combination of temperature and humidity, and as the report shows, even normal temperature can induce them if the relative humidity is higher and/or if an individual is unable to cool themselves. The state has a significant role to play in the latter. Right now, it needs to abandon the strictly meteorological definition of heatwaves in its policy framework and instead develop a more holistic sociological definition.

    Featured image credit: Austin Curtis/Unsplash.

  • Right to safe work

    The maximum daytime temperatures in the Kalaburagi and Belagavi districts of Karnataka this week are expected to be 41º C and in the late 30sº C, respectively. Research has found that if the relative humidity is high enough to render a wet-bulb temperature exceeding 30º C, outdoor exposure of even a few minutes can prove fatal.

    Yet many workers, especially in the country’s informal sector, routinely work outdoors in extreme heat with poor access to clean cool water, breaks from work, and medical attention. State-level policies and district-level heat-action plans are crucial to catch individuals who ‘slip’ through the protections available to the formal labour force.

    In this spirit, Tamil Nadu and Telangana recently notified extreme heat as a state-specific disaster. Earlier this month, Karnataka also said government offices would close by 1.30 pm in April and May and that workers employed under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in the Kalaburagi and Belagavi revenue divisions — comprising 14 districts — would receive a workload concession of 30% without any reduction in wages. From The Hindu:

    “Labourers who work in open fields during the summer months are advised to take precautions such as wearing loose cotton clothes and consuming buttermilk, coconut water, and green vegetables instead of spicy food, tea, coffee, and junk food. They should drink enough clean water. The officers concerned are also directed to provide the workers with clean drinking water, first aid box, tent, and other basic facilities at the MGNREGA worksite,” [State Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Minister Priyank Kharge] said in a press note.

    The decision aims to protect rural labourers from the harshest heat during working hours.

    These initiatives are all on the right track because they’re cognisant of the fact that climate change will force the cost of economic growth to increase. For example, sans the concession granted by Karnataka — a notably substantive state-level policy for working in less-than-ideal conditions — workers may have had to set aside a larger fraction of their incomes to pay for medical care for heat-related injuries.

    However, some media outlets have since cited a recent survey by a non-governmental organisation, ActionAid India, to report that many workers in Belagavi were unaware of the state’s announcement nor had been accorded the promised infrastructure. From Deccan Herald:

    Out of 124 recently surveyed workers in 10 villages from Chikkodi taluk, Belagavi, 72.5 per cent of people work between 10 am and 5 pm and in 68.5 per cent of cases, no tented or shaded areas were provided where workers could take a break. …

    In Raichur, where temperatures in the day can reach anywhere between 42 to 45 degrees Celsius, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) workers continue to start their shifts only at 10 am, working through peak-time heat. …

    Additionally, considering extreme heat conditions, the government had announced a 30 per cent concession on workload, with full payment, for workers in the Belagavi and Kalaburagi revenue divisions. This includes Belagavi, Dharwad, Gadag, Haveri, Bagalkot, Vijayapura, Uttara Kannada, Bidar, Kalaburagi, Raichur, Yadgir, Koppal, Ballari and Vijayanagar. However, the survey notes that 75 per cent of surveyed workers were not aware of such a provision and were not provided with any concession.

    “We have found that when such workload concessions are announced, only those who are aware and ask are provided with concessions,” says Mahantesh Hosamani, an activist from Bagalkot.

    Aside from leaving the Act’s beneficiaries bereft of social protections, the lacuna recalls that the enforcement of state- and district-level plans remains at the mercy of local bureaucrats and that there is no democratic mechanism to ensure state governments keep their promises. In this way, the additional cost imposed by extreme weather is passed to a population already dangerously vulnerable to high heat and the social welfare dimensions of climate adaptation efforts continue to stay on paper. As science journalist Mahima Jain reported in Mongabay India in 2022:

    Despite the strong evidence of climate impacts, the state and central governments are not ready to combat these issues as there are institutional changes required to fight against, Prakash said. … During summer, workers avoid working in the heat by starting before dawn and finishing by late mornings. “We need an MGNREGS plus. We need to move on from such a knee-jerk solution, as this can’t go on for years. People need to be upskilled, we need agro-based or other industries set up in the vulnerable areas so that people have alternate employment,” Prakash explained…

    Goswami too said that during heatwaves, the nature of work has to change. “We need to provide work which can be done in some shade. The working conditions are inhuman. How does one work in 49-50C?” he asked. Prakash explained, currently none of India’s social protection programmes have a climate angle. These are general programmes protecting people from different vulnerabilities. But given India’s diverse ecological zones, the impacts are different, and a one-size fits all social protection programme won’t work, and there’s a need to re-evaluate programmes from a climate lens.

    Ultimately, the Act’s goals are themselves ill-served. To quote developmental economist Gerry Rodgers writing in Economic and Political Weekly in 2024:

    … [MGNREGA] was an important part of Indira Gandhi’s 20-point programme to eliminate poverty in the early 1970s. Later in that decade, the Maharashtra Employment Guarantee Scheme changed the underlying premise from one of emergency relief to one of the right to employment, with the obligation of the state to satisfy that right. But that too was not new. The notion of the right to work has a venerable history. It is a key element of Gandhian philosophy, it is addressed in the Indian Constitution, and it is included in the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. …

    In the literature and news reports, there are also suggestions that the MGNREGA has also been used by the central government as an instrument of pressure on states governed by opposition parties, for instance, delaying allocations; or that it has been used as a vehicle to support other state policies, such as financial digitalisation or the extension of the Aadhaar card system, even when these interfered with the operation of the MGNREGA programme. Another important question about a programme such as MGNREGA is how well it integrates with other government social and redistributional policies.

    Today, rather than epitomise the ‘right to employment’, and thanks to the Centre’s repeated interference with its conduct and both the Union and state governments’ failure to upskill workers to look for less injurious employment, its workers now risk a ‘right to exploitation’.

    Featured image: MGNREGA workers remove mud from a village pond in Asir, Haryana, on February 17, 2023. Credit: Mulkh Singh/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

  • Tamil Nadu’s lukewarm heatwave policy

    I published this article here by mistake. I’d intended for it to appear in a different forum and I have submitted it there. If and when it’s published there, I will link to it here. My apologies.

  • Groundwater extinction

    In a report published on June 14, 2018, NITI Aayog, a policy think-tank established by the Government of India, claimed that 21 Indian cities would run out of their supply of groundwater by 2020. The report, especially this statistic, went on to be widely cited as a figure representing the water crisis currently facing the country (including multiple reports on The Wire). However, it appears now that this claim may not in fact be accurate.

    Joanna Slater, the India bureau chief of The Washington Post, reported through a series of tweets on June 28 that NITI Aayog’s claim could be the result of a questionable extrapolation of district-level data provided by the Central Ground Water Board (CGWB), a body under the Union ministry of water resources. The claim in the report itself is attributed to the World Bank, the World Resources Institute (WRI), Hindustan Times and The Hindu.

    However, according to Slater’s follow-ups, the WRI wasn’t the source of the claim, whereas other news reports had attributed it to the World Bank. When Slater reached out to the organisation, it denied knowledge the claim’s provenance. After she reached out to Niti Aayog, it pointed its finger at the CGWB, and which in turn denied having claimed that the 21 cities would not have access to groundwater after 2020.

    The eventual source turned out to be a CGWB report published in June 2017, a year before Niti Aayog’s report was out, and with data updated until March 2013. It provided data showing that Indian cities (gauged at the district-level) are using their respective supply of groundwater faster than the resource is being replenished; the ongoing crisis in the city of Chennai is proof that this is true. But the report doesn’t account for groundwater replenishment efforts after 2013 as well as contributions from “sources like lakes and reservoirs” (to use Slater’s words).

    Slater and others have said that faulty claims are not the way to illustrate this crisis, even if the crisis itself may be real. One unintended side-effect is that such reports might give the impression that we are in more trouble than we really are, which in turn could leave people feeling helpless, despondent and unwilling to act further.

    Second, at a time when both the state and central governments are being forced to pay attention to water issues, making a problem seem worse than it actually is could support solutions we don’t need at the expense of addressing problems that we ignored.

    For example, the BBC published a report in February last year stating that Bengaluru would soon run out of drinking and bathing water because the lakes surrounding the city weren’t clean enough. However, S. Vishwanath, a noted proponent of the sustainable use of water in the city, rebutted on Citizen Matters focusing on four reasons the BBC’s claim diverted attention from actual problems (quoting verbatim):

    1. “Bengaluru never has depended on its lakes and tanks formally for its water supply since the commissioning of the Hesarghatta project in 1896
    2. Even if we imagine the population of the Bengaluru metropolitan area to be 2.5 crores, rainwater itself [comes up to] 109 litres per head per day
    3. Wastewater treatment and recycling is picking up, thanks to sustained pressure from civil society and courts
    4. Most … doomsday predictions actually don’t take into account that the groundwater table is pretty high in the city centre … due to the availability of Cauvery water and leakages getting recharged in the ground”

    In similar vein, the Tamil Nadu state government plans to set up two more desalination plants to quench Chennai’s thirst. Given that the real problem in Chennai is that the city destroyed the rivers it banked on and paved over natural groundwater recharge basins, water-related crises in the future become opportunities for the government to usher in ‘development’ projects without addressing the underlying causes.

    The Wire
    June 29, 2019