Economic Rise of Tamil Nadu
Apurva Kumar wrote a series on Tamil Nadu’s economic growth. It is informative in bits and pieces. I’ll try and collate them here. First , TN has, over decades, moved a good number of people away from agriculture to higher income (and growth) sectors like industry, construction and services. Even within agriculture, there is greater diversity than most other states (e.g. diary, poultry and egg processing apart from regular crops). Second , industrialization has been cluster-based, i.e: “ A group of enterprises located within an identifiable and as far as practicable, contiguous area.” Examples include Tirupur (cotton knitware) and Coimbatore (spinning mills and engineering goods). Such cluster-based setups work best if infrastructure to link these enterprises is in good shape. Even among the more industrialized states, TN has done better on such infrastructure projects. Such clusters also provide an alternative to farm workers – they can move to industria...