Positions · Development
The Dravidian model, stated plainly
Most development debates offer a choice: grow first or share first. Salem Dharanidharan's standing argument is that Tamil Nadu never accepted the choice — and that the rest of India should stop pretending it must.
In June 2023 he put the case bluntly in The Wire: the rest of India should emulate the "Dravidian model". The phrase is often used as a slogan; his contribution is to treat it as a testable proposition. Strip away the rhetoric and the model is two commitments run in parallel — aggressive social justice and aggressive industrialisation — each making the other affordable.
The social half came first, and it is the older Dravidian inheritance: reservations that widened who gets educated, schemes that pushed schooling deep into the countryside, and a political culture that treats a welfare queue as a citizenship right rather than charity. The result, he argues, was not dependency but capability — a workforce ready when the factories arrived.
Welfare is not the opposite of growth; it is the tooling for it.
And arrive they did. Tamil Nadu today is among India's most industrialised and urbanised big states, with one of its broadest college systems and deepest manufacturing bases. When he defends the breakfast scheme or free bus travel for women, the frame is always the same ledger: these are investments that return, measured in enrolment, participation and productivity.
Critics call the model expensive; his reply is that the alternative is more expensive — growth that stalls because it educated too few, hired too narrowly and trusted markets to do a state's work. The Dravidian model, stated plainly, is compound interest on inclusion.
Whether the rest of India adopts it is politics. That it deserves study, he insists, is arithmetic.
As argued in
"Why the Rest of India Should Emulate the 'Dravidian Model'" — The Wire, June 2023
"These reforms are more like GST 1.2 than 2.0" — The New Indian Express, September 2025