kerala – Pertinent Observations

Dam capacity

In Mint, Narayan Ramachandran has a nice op-ed on the issue of dam capacity and damn management in the wake of the floods in Kerala last year. In that, he writes:

For dams to do their jobs in extreme situations, they should have large unfilled capacity in their reservoirs when extreme events occur

Reading this piece reminded me of Benoit Mandelbrot’s The (Mis)Behaviour of Markets, and his description of the efforts of the colonial British government in Egypt in deciding the height of the Aswan dam. The problem with the Nile was “long range dependence” – the flow in the river in a year was positively correlated with the flow in the previous few years. This meant that there would be years of high flow followed by years of low flow.

The problem was solved by a British hydrologist Harold Edwin Hurst by looking at thousands of years of data of the flooding of the Nile (yes, this data was available), and there is a nice description of it in Mandelbrot’s book.

I had taken a few insights from this chapter for my own piece on long-range dependence in stock markets that I had written for Mint a few years back.

Coming back to Narayan’s piece, one problem is that in India we have an obsession with keeping dams filled up. In Karnataka, for example, every year during the monsoons, newspapers keep track of the level of water in the major reservoirs, expressing worry in case they’re not full enough. In that sense, I guess our dams haven’t been planned for long-range water sharing, and that has contributed to problems such as sudden water release.

Also not helping matters I guess is the fact that a lot of rivers flow across states, and the level of dams is a source of negotiation between states, and this leads to further keeping them small and ill-geared to long term water management.

On Sub-nationalism

Pramit Bhattacharya has a nice piece in MintOnSunday about the positives of sub-nationalism, which fosters provision of public and common goods. He cites academic research to contrast Kerala and Uttar Pradesh, which were similar in the mid-19th century, but now have significantly differing levels of public goods.

The research Bhattacharya cites argues that the linguistic sub-nationalism that was formed in Kerala in the mid 19th century was responsible for the state’s high levels of public goods and development. The absence of such sub-nationalism has resulted in weak institutions and weak development in UP, he says.

He ends the piece saying that sub-nationalism is not always a good thing and can lead to secessionist tendencies. He cites the example of Assam, where sub-nationalism has actually hampered development rather than fostering it.

This discussion reminds me about last year’s “unofficial” referendum in Catalunya about whether to secede from Spain. The vote was unofficial since the Spanish Parliament didn’t authorise it, but there were strong signs of Catalan nationalism when I visited Barcelona last October. The Yellow, Red and Blue flag of Catalan nationalism hung from several windows. There was a clock in one of the main squares counting down to the referendum (which finally didn’t matter).

And while there were several emotional reasons for the demand for secessions, including repression at the hands of the “Castilians”, one of the main reasons was economic – the share of national spending on Catalunya was far less than the proportion of Catalunya’s contribution to the Spanish National Budget. The feeling of “why should we subsidise the rest of the country?” was rampant.

This little story illustrates both the positive and negative aspects of sub-nationalism. The negative is easy to see from the above – strong sub-nationalism leads to a strong “us and them” sentiment towards the rest of the country, and the region begins to resent the rest of the country, especially if the latter gets a larger share of the national pie. And this can lead to secessionist tendencies as is evident in Catalunya.

The positive thing about sub-nationalism, on the other hand, is that it subsumes groupism at smaller levels. A strong sub-nationalist feeling means that people think of themselves as members of that sub-nationalist group, and solidarity to any “lower level” groups weakens.

The problem with high solidarity among small groups is that it may lead to provision of private goods at the expense of public goods. When a place is strongly divided by caste, for example, each caste group wants to maximise the interest of the particular caste, and thus invests in a way that the caste gets a bigger share of the seemingly fixed pie.

When the solidarity is at the level of a state or region, on the other hand, the best way to develop the region or state is to provide for public goods or welfare schemes that span the entire state or region, and this leads to an expansion of the pie and the overall development of the region. In other words, when the “us” is a largish geographical area, it is more likely that investments happen in terms of public goods for the area rather than private goods.

Coming back to the example of Kerala, the strong Malayali subnationalism of the mid 19th century had the effect of pushing down casteism. Consequently, the groupism happened at a level (“Malayalis”) that was larger and more diverse than the caste-level groupism that happened elsewhere (like in UP) where there was no strong sub-nationlist movement. The lack of sub-nationalism in a place like UP has meant that casteist divisions in the region have remained strong, and solidarity at that level doesn’t lead to public goods or development.

Think of the nation as a hierarchy, of sub-nations and sub-sub-nations and so forth. And each person’s loyalty is divided in different extents up and down the person’s “chain”. And among these different layers, it is a zero sum game. Thus, strong loyalties at a particular level are resented both by levels higher and lower, and justifiably so. But the higher the level at which the loyalty remains, the better it is for the provision of public goods and development. Chew on it.

Ranji nostalgia

It was the winter of 1991-92. I had just got introduced to this wonderful game called cricket, and about a month earlier had seen my first ever full one day international (on TV, of course). India had thrashed Australia at Perth. Ravi Shastri had taken 5-15 but still the man of the match award went to Srikkanth who made 60. This was two days after I had turned nine.

India was touring Australia and cricket craze hit me. It hit me so bad I couldn’t have enough of cricket. In a few days’ time I’d pulled out all the newspapers in my house and rummaged through them for cricket scorecards and stories. I remember getting fascinated reading about the England-West Indies series of 1991. And while going through the newspapers I saw that there was a Ranji trophy match on, and it was being broadcast live on radio. Out came my grandfather’s ancient pocket transistor.

The game was being played at Kolar Gold Fields (an ironic choice considering the Cauvery riots were on – the reason I had holidays from school and could indulge in luxuries like listening to Ranji commentary). On the first day, Karnataka had bowled Goa out cheaply, with Anil Kumble (i think) doing most damage. Goa had this left arm spinner in their line-up called Arun Shetty, and on the second day, he was spinning webs around the Karnataka batsmen. He took a 5-for that day, most of them bowled. Only one man was able to resist him. That also happened to be the day Rahul Dravid made his first first-class century.

Karnataka duly won the game by 10 wickets, with Dravid’s 100 being the difference between the teams in the first innings. Karnataka would go on to massacre Kerala and Andhra, while they drew Hyderabad after conceding a large first innings lead. Tamil Nadu were beaten by one wicket, but some silly points system in the Ranji meant that Karnataka, with four wins and a draw didn’t go through while Hyderabad and TN, with three wins each made it to the knockouts.

Unfortunately I don’t think I followed any other Ranji season as closely as that one, until cricinfo came along that is. Forget international matches (India’s tour of Australia, world cup, etc.), I would know the scorecards of most Ranji matches. At the ripe age of ten, I was able to provide insightful commentary on domestic cricket, on Indian team selections, and so forth. Sadly, I would never play the game.

Nowadays occasionally when I’m trying to take a break from work, I pick a random Ranji season from the 1990s and start looking up the scorecards. First the scorecards of all the South Zone matches (remember that Ranji was zonal in those days)., and then the knockouts. I remember that in one of the seasons in the early 90s, there were no draws at all in the knockouts (or maybe there were one or two here and there) – a far cry from nowadays when hardly one innings gets completed. And then I go on to look at the Duleep Trophy scorecards from the season – and these are the most interesting since I’m likely to know more players there.

It’s an awesomely good feeling to find a scorecard of a match that I remember, and I don’t know why but each time this happens I’m reminded of that game at KGF, the first one I followed, when Rahul Dravid made his first first-class century.