# r3-b1-16

**Claim (as registered):** The distinct-institution density (distinct holding-institution names per 1,000 records) does not exceed 103 per 1,000 in any complete state.

**Proposed mechanism:** Proposed to be a legacy-of-local-collecting-culture effect specific to each state, not a scale effect -- a clean power-law relationship between record count and institution count was explicitly checked for and rejected (the largest state by record count has one of the LOWEST densities; the second-largest has the HIGHEST).

**Scope:** Source: NAMAMI (India), a state-facetted manuscript-holdings portal (holdings, not origin -- every record is held-by, not produced-by, the state). Training: 11 states with a complete portal walk (~4.22M records: Bihar, Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal). Holdout: 9 more states/union territories walked to completion after this claim was fixed (Jammu & Kashmir, Assam, Haryana, Delhi, Manipur, Puducherry, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand), each landed as a complete, reconciled count before testing. All data comes from one portal, so survival across states shows stability within this portal's own cataloguing practice, not independently of it.

**Training-side evidence:** Density per 1,000 records ranges from West Bengal 1.10 (the lowest, a handful of grand institutions) up to Odisha 51.60 (the highest, holdings scattered across many small village/temple/private collections) -- a roughly 47x spread. The ceiling (103) is set at about 2x the training maximum.

**Holdout test and outcome:** Tested across all nine India holdout states/UTs; every state's density stayed inside the registered ceiling.

**Status:** Survived every tested holdout state.
