When Tenkasi took on Ahmedabad and nine other Goliaths

If you are not from Tamil Nadu, chances are that you are hearing the word Tenkasi for the first time. It is a small town in the southern Tamil Nadu district of Tirunelveli, and it is a Lok Sabha constituency as well. It’s my own Lok Sabha constituency, to be specific. It comprises six assembly constituencies spread across two districts, none of them even a district headquarter. It is the only reserved constituency in southern Tamil Nadu. The entire constituency is full of rural pockets/villages except for six towns (the Assembly constituencies). It borders the Western Ghats (mostly the wrong side of it, unfortunately) and it has an agrarian economy. Most of the constituency does not have continuous irrigation throughout the year and my own town, Sankarankovil, is infamous for water scarcity.

We always hear that the Southern part of India is doing well as far as social indicators go. Is this just hype? Some say it only the deepest pockets of each of the worst performing states that do badly, and that urbanisation in the South has helped its cause. They also argue that the deeper pockets in the South are as bad as the BIMARU states and it is only Chennai, Coimbatore, Trichy and Madurai that help the scores by doing exceedingly well. Is it the case that a few stars glitter and hide the not-so-well-off rural pockets in the South? Let us check this out.

I audaciously thought that perhaps even a comparison between my humble constituency and the big cities from North India (in generally accepted education and health indices) would settle the matter. I decided to check out this gut feeling and took the cities of Bhopal, Raipur, Jaipur, Lucknow, Patna and Ranchi – each one a state Capital – for my little exercise. I also threw in Ahmedabad (W), Bhubaneswar and Tamil Nadu’s own Chennai to spice things up. I have taken my data (raw numbers for each measure in all the selected constituencies) from factchecker.in.

I took into account only the health and education indices and not economic ones like per capita expenditure and labour force participation for the scope of this study.

The parameters taken were the following:

Health

1.Sex ratio (females per 1000 males)

2.Institutional births (in per cent)

3.Infant mortality rate (deaths per 1000 live births)

4.Diarrhoea prevalence (reported) among children aged zero to five years in the last two weeks preceding the survey (in per cent)

5. Stunting among children under five (in per cent)

6. Wasting among children under five (in per cent)

7. Underweight among children under five (in per cent)

8. Anaemia prevalence among children aged six to 59 months (in per cent)

9.Aneamia prevalence among women (in per cent)

Education

1. Net Enrollment Ratio at Upper Primary Level (in per cent)

2. Dropout Rate at Grade V (in per cent)

3. Women with 10 or more years of schooling (in per cent)

I took each of these indicators, gave rank to each one of the cities – for example, the city with the highest institutional birth among the10 cities, got rank 1 for the measure and city with the lowest got rank 10. Once all the cities were assigned ranks for each measure, I averaged the ranks scored across all the parameters for every city – obviously the city with the lowest number performed best as a whole.

The results vindicated me and how! Only Chennai (Central), the capital of Tamil Nadu, bettered Tenkasi. Yes, that is right, Tenkasi beat every other city (all of them state Capitals, except Ahmedabad) fair and square. A surprise additional finding was that the city where I lived for 12 years, Bhubaneswar, came third. This was the final ranking – details for each measure given in the later part of the article.

This should be an eye-opener. I am sure there are constituencies in Tamil Nadu which are performing poorer than Tenkasi, but it is time the Northern states pulled their socks up and started working. We are speaking about a remote unknown constituency beating seven state Capitals and a commercial Capital. To put things in perspective, Tenkasi is to Tamil Nadu what Pilibhit is to Uttar Pradesh, in fact, even smaller in terms of size or accessibility or industrialisation. Not just Allah and Jesus but I am sure even Ram, Buddha and Sikh gurus want just that!

It is time the people of these states started settling the question of accountability. It is time politicians took responsibility and delivered. It is time goals were set and performance was measured. While I do not want to get much into politics in this article, I feel politicians (successive governments) and officials are solely responsible for this tragedy. The Southern parties are accused of welfare politics, but I am sure they have played a huge role in these indices. For example, there is a scheme named ‘Moovalur Ramamirtham Ammaiyar Ninaivu Marriage Assistance Scheme’, which gives Rs.25,000 for girls who have passed Class 10 as marriage assistance and Rs. 50,000 for degree holders, all via Electronic Clearance Service. Another notable scheme is ‘Dr. Muthulakshmi Maternity Bene-fit Scheme’.

Tamil Nadu was among the first states to introduce the Mid-day meal scheme back in the 1960s and then made it further effective with the introduction of eggs. This has a direct effect on the nutrition of children. Along with this, schemes like free bus passes to students, free cycles, free laptops and the like make sure that there is a higher number of school-going-students in general. For those of you, who are against freebies, my view is that a poor student getting a laptop out of the tax money that I am paying is far better than that money ending up in the coffers of a crony capitalist financing a German imported vehicle of a politician.

But maybe it is not the welfare schemes at all. Maybe it is something else.

Tamil Nadu in general and Tenkasi, in particular, have all the typical ‘problems’ of any constituency in India. Votes are cast based on caste in most cases and being a reserved constituency, the parties the candidates belong to garner votes from specific caste vote banks, just like anywhere in Uttar Pradesh or Rajasthan. There are always corrupt officials and politicians, there is always an economic in-equality but there is something that has worked wonders here. It is time politicians from the North stopped making jokes like ‘Ker-ala should learn Uttar Pradesh’ and started delivering results. Tenkasi seems to have a serious issue with anaemia and an unexpectedly low number of women with 10years of education. I plan to speak to the district/town health and education officials to understand this more.

On a side note, who would have thought that Jaipur could be doing better than Ahmedabad? Lucknow scores the lowest among this 10 and can someone in Lucknow take these figures to their public representatives and officials and start asking the right questions? Bhubaneswar has the worst infant mortality rate and it must be addressed in an emergency basis.

So how does your constituency fair?

Simple charts below show how these constituencies rank in each of the parameters.

1.Sex ratio (females per 1000 males): This measure indicates elective abortions, among other things and India is aiming towards a higher ratio.

2. Institutional birth (in per cent): This indicates birth in a health facility as opposed to homes. There have been concentrated efforts to get this up so that there is right and adequate care is given to the mother and the newborn and anything untoward is immediately attended to. This is also a greater social indicator in terms of how much the woman’s life is given importance in the family and a great indicator of affordability as well.

3. Infant mortality rate (deaths per 1000 live births): Infant mortality is the death of young children under the age of 1. A clear indicator of neonatal and infant healthcare and facilities available to resuscitate a sick newborn/infant and a reflection of sanitation, access to clean drinking water, immunization, mother’s nutritional health, mother’s level of education and allover economic affordability and delivery of healthcare. TamilNadu, incidentally, has one of the best-established and run government medical facilities and has one of the best doctor: population ratios.

4. Diarrhoea prevalence (reported) among children aged 0-5 years in the last two weeks preceding the survey (in per cent). This is an indicator of sanitation, access to toilets, access to safe drinking water, health education and economic conditions.

5. Stunting among children under five (in per cent): Stunting is simply when the child’s height for age is below the set norm –it is an indication of chronic undernutrition. UNICEF says India's average is 38. India has one-third of the world’s stunted children as per the 2018 Global Nutrition report.

6. Wasting among children under five (in per cent): A child is classified as wasted when has low weight for her height and this is a more severe indicator of acute malnutrition. When not corrected, wasting is one of the most important reasons for infant mortality. UNICEF says that in India 20 per cent of children under five years of age suffer from wasting due to acute undernutrition.

7.Underweight among children under five (in per cent): This is like wasting and indicates underweight but this in relation to the age of the child. This is again an indicator of malnutrition.

8. Anaemia prevalence among children aged six to 59 months (per cent): Anemia again indicates malnutrition and healthy balanced diet takes care of this. Untreated, it can cause serious damage to the body including heart conditions.

9. Anaemia prevalence among women (in per cent): Anemia in women is very common and more so in the poor households. Anaemia is the biggest cause of disability in India for last 10years according to the Global Burden of Disease surveys. Disability here is the absence of good health. Dietary habits (animal-based iron is better absorbed), poor sanitation, malnutrition are the leading causes of anaemic women in India.

Education Indicators

1.Net Enrollment Ratio at Upper Primary Level (in per cent): (No data available for Lucknow)

2. Dropout Rate at Grade V (in per cent): Dropouts happen due to poverty, child labour, migration among other reasons. Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan scheme was brought in mainly to address this. Schemes like mid-day meals, free education, quality government schools help retain the children in schools. (No data available for Chennai)

3. Women with 10 or more years of schooling (in per cent): When you educate a woman in India, you educate her family. Numerous social and data studies have shown that it is pivotal to have gird children educated.

(Sathyan R is a techie and a news junkie with an interest in politics and social issues)