This letter was written in May 2026, in the first week of Tamil Nadu’s new government.
An open letter to Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay — and to every citizen of Tamil Nadu who wants to be more than a spectator
Chief Minister Vijay,
Tamil Nadu has just done something it has not done in nearly six decades. It looked at the two choices it has always been handed and chose a third. That deserves to be named for what it is — not just a political result, but a statement of collective self-belief. The people of this state did not merely vote for a party. They voted for the possibility that things could be done differently.
You stepped into office with humility — “I am not a devathoodhan. I am one among you” — and that is precisely the register in which this letter is written. Not as a petition from outside the system, but as a conversation between people who share a stake in what Tamil Nadu becomes.
We write this as Inner Companion, a Chennai-based organisation that works at the intersection of learning, earning, and living. We work with the belief that the quality of a society is inseparable from the quality of the inner lives of its people — their sense of agency, their relationships with each other, with their land, and with what they consider worth building. We have no political affiliation. We have only a deep investment in the future of this state.
This letter is also addressed to every citizen who voted, celebrated, and then wondered — what now? You are the other reader we are writing for.
On the White Paper You Have Promised
We welcome your commitment to release a White Paper on Tamil Nadu’s finances. Transparency about what has been inherited is the foundation of honest governance, and the people deserve to know.
But we want to gently propose that finances are only one dimension of a state’s health.
A state can have manageable debt and still be deeply unwell. It can post GDP growth and still be burning its topsoil, medically overworked, and producing graduates who do not know what they are for. Tamil Nadu is, at this moment, navigating at least four crises that do not appear in any budget line — and that no financial white paper will capture.
A climate crisis. Tamil Nadu is among India’s most climate-exposed states. Its coastline is retreating. Its rivers run dry in summer and overflow in the monsoon. Its urban heat is intensifying. Cyclones are arriving with less warning and more force. The communities hit hardest are the same communities your manifesto most wants to protect — farmers, fishermen, women, the poor. If this government’s welfare architecture does not have climate resilience built into its foundation, it will be continuously undone by forces that no scheme can compensate for.
A mental wellbeing crisis. This one is largely invisible, because it lives inside homes and behind silence. The rates of anxiety, depression, and substance dependence in Tamil Nadu — particularly among youth, women managing multiple burdens, and farming families under debt — are not reflected in our public health spending or our institutional priorities. Your pledge to create a drug-free Tamil Nadu is a beginning. But drug use is almost always a symptom, not the disease. The disease is the inner life we have collectively neglected.
An employability crisis. Not a jobs shortage — an alignment crisis. We are producing graduates by the millions who are qualified for a world that is changing faster than our syllabi. Meanwhile, the skills, knowledge, and ways of being that would actually sustain Tamil Nadu’s communities — ecological knowledge, traditional crafts, care work, local enterprise — are not counted as employable. The result is a generation that is simultaneously over-credentialed and under-equipped.
A civic crisis. This one is perhaps the most foundational. We have, over generations, been conditioned to understand citizenship as voting once every five years and expecting delivery in return. The relationship between the governed and the governing has become transactional, not participatory. A government that genuinely wants to be different must build different structures for civic engagement — not as gesture, but as architecture.
We offer these not as criticisms of your manifesto, but as an expanded frame. Because here is what we believe: the solutions to all four of these crises already exist within the commitments you have made. They simply need to be read more deeply, and acted upon more boldly.
On Farming as a Compounding Investment
Your manifesto’s commitment to farmers — crop loan waivers, higher MSP, specific provisions for small and marginal farmers — is among its most significant pledges. We want to make the case that this is also your most leveraged investment, if it is paired with the courage to go further than debt relief.
Supporting farmers to return to natural and traditional growing practices is not nostalgia. It is, in fact, the most comprehensive public health policy, the most effective nutrition policy, the most durable climate adaptation strategy, and the most powerful form of heritage preservation available to this government — all in one.
Consider what is at stake. Tamil Nadu is home to hundreds of indigenous rice varieties, pulse varieties, and dry-land crops that have been quietly disappearing, displaced by high-input hybrid seeds that require fertilisers, pesticides, and irrigation at levels that small farmers cannot sustainably afford. The shift to these systems has not only indebted farmers — it has poisoned watersheds, degraded soil, and introduced a cascade of pesticide-linked health conditions that disproportionately affect the women and children who live in farming households. The ₹25 lakh health insurance your government is committed to providing will be under steady demand, in part, because of what is happening in the fields.
When a farmer is relieved of debt and encouraged — with practical support, not just rhetoric — to grow traditional varieties using natural methods, something remarkable happens. The soil begins to recover. The water table stabilises. The farmer’s household is no longer spending on inputs it cannot afford. The food grown is more nutritious. The local food system becomes more resilient. And the knowledge required to do this — which lives in the hands and memory of older farmers — is passed on rather than lost.
We would encourage this government to consider, alongside its loan waiver programme, a Natural Farming Transition Initiative — where farmers who voluntarily shift to natural growing practices over a defined period receive income support during the transition, access to saved seed banks of indigenous varieties, peer-learning networks, and market linkages that give traditional produce the premium it deserves. Several states, including Andhra Pradesh and Sikkim, have mapped this territory. Tamil Nadu could do it better, with the cultural richness and ecological diversity it already holds.
The women of farming families would be among the greatest beneficiaries of such a shift. The ₹2,500 monthly stipend your government has promised addresses income. But a woman whose household is no longer burdened by debt, whose children are eating food grown without synthetic chemicals, whose kitchen garden is producing what the family needs — that woman has not just income. She has agency.
This is the kind of governance that Tamil Nadu’s best traditions have always pointed toward. Kamaraj understood that feeding a child was inseparable from educating them. Periyar understood that dignity could not be separated from economic self-determination. The ecological extension of that thinking is available to you, if you choose to take it.
On Technology — and the Questions Worth Asking First
We note your government’s expressed interest in establishing an AI University and an AI Ministry, and we want to engage with this carefully, because technology deserves careful engagement.
Artificial intelligence is not neutral. The infrastructure required to run large AI systems — the data centres, the energy consumption, the rare earth minerals for hardware — carries environmental costs that are rarely included in the enthusiasm for what the technology can do. An AI University built on the promise of future-readiness is a meaningful investment only if it graduates people who understand not just how to use these tools, but when to use them, what questions to ask about their consequences, and what they cannot and should not replace.
We are not arguing against technology. We are arguing for technological literacy that is deeper than technical skill.
The more urgent question is: what problem are we solving, and is this the best tool for it? If the goal is better learning outcomes for Tamil Nadu’s children, the evidence strongly suggests that a present, motivated teacher in a well-resourced classroom does more than any algorithm. If the goal is better health outcomes, clean water and uncontaminated food outperform any diagnostic app. If the goal is more resilient livelihoods, diverse local economies are more durable than platforms built on venture capital.
Technology built on top of a strong foundation multiplies what is already working. Technology used to substitute for a foundation that has not been built is expensive decoration.
We offer this not as a caution against ambition, but as a request for the right order of operations. Build the foundation. Then build the future on it.
On Education — and the Question You Have Already Started Asking
You have opposed NEET. We want to stand beside that opposition and ask you to go further.
NEET is a symptom of a deeper assumption: that the purpose of education is to sort people into a hierarchy of approved professions — and that this sorting should be controlled by a single, centralised examination that has historically been designed in a language and a cultural context that disadvantages Tamil students. Your opposition to it, grounded in state autonomy and social justice, is correct.
But we want to invite you to ask the more fundamental question: what is education actually for?
Because if the answer is “to produce employable graduates,” we are not much further along than NEET. We are just arguing about which gate should be used to enter the same narrow pathway.
We believe — and this is the work Inner Companion has been built around — that education’s real purpose is to help a person understand themselves, develop their capacity to think and feel and act responsibly, and find their place in a community and an ecosystem that they can contribute to meaningfully. This is not a soft or peripheral goal. It is the most practical goal education can have, because it is the only one that produces citizens capable of sustaining a society rather than simply consuming one.
The 500 Creative Schools in your manifesto are a genuine opening. But the word “creative” will only mean something if it is defined in opposition to the current model’s deepest conditioning — the belief that learning is the transfer of information from teacher to student, that examinations measure intelligence, that a degree confers value, and that the destination of education is a salary.
Tamil Nadu has produced extraordinary thinkers, artists, scientists, farmers, and healers throughout its history — most of them outside the framework of formal credentialing. The knowledge of a Narikuravar elder about medicinal plants, the structural intuition of a temple sculptor, the ecological management of a tank irrigation farmer — these are not lesser forms of knowing. They are, in many cases, forms of knowing that no university has yet figured out how to teach.
Your party succeeded in part because young people trusted it. That trust is a mandate to model what you are asking of them — to break from old conditioning, to chart courses that are genuinely new, to measure success by whether a community is more alive and more just, not by whether a metric has been hit.
Give Tamil Nadu’s youth an education system that asks them who they are, not just what they can do. The return on that investment will take a generation to mature — and it will outlast every government that has ever sat in Fort St. George.
What Citizens Can Actually Do — Starting Now
This letter is not only to you, Chief Minister. It is also to the person reading this who voted, celebrated, and then went back to their life.
Democracy is not a vending machine. You do not insert a vote and collect change. The mandate you gave this government is not a transaction — it is the beginning of a relationship. And like all relationships, it requires sustained, mutual engagement to produce anything real.
Here is what that looks like in practice:
In Closing
Chief Minister Vijay, you said something in your inaugural address that we want to hold alongside everything else: “This is your government.”
We take you at your word.
This government is ours to support, to question, to contribute to, and to hold accountable — not from a place of suspicion, but from a place of investment. The same investment that brought hundreds of thousands to your rallies, that put faith in a party that did not exist two years ago, that chose the third option when the choice seemed binary.
Tamil Nadu has done remarkable things before when it decided to. It has led India in literacy, in welfare architecture, in cultural assertion, in political imagination. The tradition you are inheriting is not just the debt load from the last government. It is also Kamaraj’s free meals, Periyar’s insistence on dignity, the Tamil culture’s ancient belief that a society is measured by how it treats its most vulnerable.
We are at the beginning of something. The window is open. What we build in the next five years will either compound into something genuinely different, or it will be another cycle — better-intentioned than before, but ultimately another delivery system that leaves the deeper structures untouched.
The choice is yours to lead. And it is ours to support.
We extend our hand.
Inner Companion is a Chennai-based organisation working at the intersection of learning, earning, and living — helping individuals and communities develop the mindsets, relationships, and practices needed to live and contribute meaningfully. This letter reflects our institutional perspective and is offered in the spirit of civic partnership.
We welcome responses, conversation, and collaboration — from the government, from citizens, and from anyone else who believes that Tamil Nadu’s best chapter has not yet been written.
Jayashree Arasu is the Director of Inner Companion Alternative Learning and Research Foundation.