Kalapet

Kalapet is the northernmost enclave of the Union Territory of Puducherry — a sliver of French colonial geography surrounded on three sides by Tamil Nadu's Viluppuram district and bounded on the east by the Bay of Bengal. France annexed the village in 1703, and when India absorbed the French territories in 1954, the boundary persisted. Three centuries later, Kalapet remains administratively part of Puducherry despite being physically separated from the rest of the territory by Tamil Nadu's jurisdiction. The boundary is path-dependent: it exists because it existed, maintained by the bureaucratic inertia of two successive colonial transfers rather than by any geographic or economic logic.

The enclave's defining institution is Pondicherry University, a central research university whose campus spans over 800 acres along the coast — an institutional footprint that dwarfs the settlement it sits in. The university functions as a niche constructor: it generates the demand for housing, food services, transport, and retail that constitutes most of Kalapet's local economy. Remove the university, and the settlement loses its economic rationale, the way removing a reef collapses the fish populations that depend on its structure. The territory also hosts Puducherry's central prison, concentrating two of the union territory's largest institutions — education and incarceration — in its most geographically isolated enclave.

The cost of redrawing a French colonial boundary across Indian state lines exceeds the cost of administering a geographic anomaly — and so the anomaly endures. Every bus route, water pipe, and power line connecting Kalapet to Puducherry must cross Tamil Nadu's jurisdiction, adding coordination costs that a contiguous territory would never face. A resident needing a district court hearing or a specialist hospital bed travels to Puducherry proper, crossing another state's territory to access services from their own. Kalapet cannot sustain these institutions independently; its population falls below the thresholds required to justify them. This is island biogeography applied to governance: small, isolated administrative territories support fewer institutions than contiguous ones, just as small islands support fewer species than mainlands. The pattern repeats wherever boundaries persist past the conditions that created them — not because the boundaries still make sense, but because dismantling them costs more than the inefficiency they produce.