PATNA: With enough cooperation from the Centre, Bihar can scale greater heights and could even achieve a growth of 20 per cent in GDP, said chief minister Nitish Kumar. According to Nitish this laggard state could soon be a developed state, only if the Centre could contribute to the state's kitty as per the expectation of his government.
"In any case, it's our committment and mission to make Bihar a developed state by 2015 whether we get help from the Centre or not," Nitish said. The chief minister was speaking at a function to felicitate him for being conferred the 'Business Reformer of the Year Award', organised by the business and trade community of Bihar on Monday.
The event was organised by the Bihar Chamber of Commerce (BCC) and representatives of various bodies of the state.
Addressing the BCC members, Nitish warned that attempts could be made to undo all the good work done by his government in the development of the state, which has created a good image of the state within and outside the country.
"A major achievement of my government, which stirred the conscience of the nation, is the CSO findings projecting Bihar's GDP at 11.3%," Nitish said. Nitish spoke about the real estate boom in the state, which according to him was an indicator of the state's growth.
"In any case, the Business Reformer award would be meaningless if no investment comes to Bihar," the chief minister said. He said with elections due he wouldn't like to decieve the people of Bihar who have pinned so much hope on him.
"I am sure no one will like to go back to the dark days of Bihar where one lived under constant terror and was compelled to retire home soon after the sunset," he said. BCC chairman P K Agarwal said that many more business and trade organisations wanted to honour the CM but due to paucity of time representatives of only 20 bodies could attend the function.
A documentary of the award ceremony held in Mumbai on December 20 was shown to the gathering. The organisaitons that felicitated Nitish included Chamber of Commerce & Industries of Bhagalpur, Ara, Muzaffarpur, Darbhanga, Chapra, Begusarai, Jehanabad, Hajipur, Lakhisarai, Madhubani, Danapur, Katihar, Nalanda, Fatuha, Chemist & Druggist Assocaition, Khadyan Vyasayi Sangh, New Market Dukandar Samiti and Hathwa Market Vyasayi Sangh.
Times Of India
Friday, January 29, 2010
Bihar can achieve 20% growth: CM
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Pride and Prejudice
Who carries you on a rickshaw or an autorickshaw in Delhi? Biharis. Who drives the cars of Delhiites? Biharis. Who built the Delhi Metro Biharis. (You may not agree with the last one.)
Who is building the new houses and the expanding suburbs of Delhi? Biharis. Who made Punjab the most prosperous state in the country? The answer again is Biharis. (Here too you may not agree.)
The credit for building the Delhi Metro or making Punjab prosperous will never go to Biharis. Does anyone ever say that blacks built America?
In colonial days, Bihar supplied the girmitiya, or indentured, labourers who built countries like Mauritius, Suriname and Fiji. A bulk of the labour employed in the Raj capital of Calcutta came from Bihar. After Independence Bihari workers flocked to places like Delhi, Punjab and Mumbai.
At the same time, Biharis excelled in other fields. Many became great political leaders, ICS and IAS officers, scientists, doctors, engineers, writers and artists. Delhi and other Indian cities attracted huge white-collar Bihari populations and Biharis formed a large part of the Indian diaspora of professionals.
But in the eyes of the rest of India, “Bihari” had come to mean a labourer, a person doing menial jobs. It had become a term of scorn and contempt. In their anglicized lingo, places like Delhi University turned the word into “Harry”, but the pejorative tone remained unmistakable.
Heaping scorn on the working classes is a universal phenomenon. That is how words like Negro, Paki (used for Pakistanis and Indians in Britain) and some of the words denoting dalit castes in India earned contemptuous connotations.
In fact, while Biharis were getting their hands dirty on Punjab’s farms, Punjabis were migrating in hordes to the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. Never mind that they would take up blue-collar jobs as taxi drivers, petrol pump attendants and waiters in those faraway lands.
As the years passed, many of the Biharis who had come to Punjab or Mumbai as manual labourers started moving up the economic ladder as did the blue-collar Indian emigrants abroad. A usually unnoticed aspect of the so-called racial attacks against Indians abroad is the threat the rise of working classes poses to the entrenched social order. This accentuates the contempt they face. From this angle, the attacks on Biharis in Punjab, and Mumbai, and the attacks on Indians abroad are manifestations of the same phenomenon.
What stopped Biharis from bringing about a green revolution or building a Metro in Bihar? The answer is geography and history. Geography, because ravaged by floods, the land of Bihar was unable to feed its growing population. And history, because what was the centre of the biggest Indian empire in ancient times was reduced to an obscure provincial existence. The skewed landownership system introduced by the British rulers worsened the situation.
Things could have improved after Independence had the political leadership of Bihar been able to exert influence on the rulers in New Delhi to get enough funds for development projects and set off a process of industry in the state.
On the contrary, Bihar continued to live the same, conveniently ignored, provincial existence. A system built on casteism, nepotism, corruption and crime came to dominate the state. It spawned a neo-rich class of netas, babus, contractors and government engineers who would build palatial houses for themselves with the money meant for dams, power projects, ration for the poor or even fodder for cattle.
The money meant for roads and public amenities would go into their bank accounts. No wonder, the roads in front of those houses would be full of ditches and become the playground of pigs every monsoon.
With limited options of higher education and hardly any employment opportunities in the state, the youth of Bihar started looking out. They flooded places like Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University. They started dominating the country’s toughest competitions like the IIT-JEE and the civil services exam. With this success, Biharis started believing they had the best brains. The world began to grudgingly acknowledge their capabilities.
Academic success, however, did not do much to rid the word “Bihari” of the scorn it had gathered. People in Delhi continued to laugh at those who spoke with a Bihari accent. Those without an accent would get this compliment: “Oh, you are from Bihar? But you don’t sound like a Bihari.”
Biharis, meanwhile, were retreating into a shell, with little but the historic glory of Buddha, Mahavira, Chandragupta, Chanakya, Ashoka, Aryabhatta, Guru Gobind Singh and Sher Shah to bask in. Now comes 11% growth. The state can recover from the damage it has suffered over hundreds of years only if such a high rate of growth can be sustained for many, many years. Then Biharis would not have to till others' land or build cities and countries elsewhere.
The writer is proud to be a Bihari
Vinay Pandey, TNN, 10 January 2010, 12:15am IST
Link:- Special Report On Times of India 10-01-2010
Bihar, a growth story
Roads “as smooth as Hema Malini’s cheeks” was a promise that Lalu Yadav had once given to the people of Bihar. Ironically, it is his rival Nitish Kumar who seems to be delivering on that front. Despite three years of floods followed by a year of drought, ‘backward and benighted’ Bihar reports a miraculous figure: 11% GDP growth, second only to Gujarat. The state’s economy has never grown so fast so consistently as it has since 2004-2005. A few pointers on what’s going right in Bihar:
* Getting anywhere in Bihar has always been an exercise in endurance. But that’s changing. More than 6,800 km of roads have been relaid and 1,600 bridges and culverts constructed in the last four years. Journey time in India’s 12th largest state, sprawling over 94,163 sq km, has been cut by half today in many places. Now, most of the state’s 38 districts — from northernmost West Champaran to Kaimur on the western end — are a drive of six hours or less from Patna.
* Automobile sales in the state grew 45% in 2009, at a time when sales had dipped 20-25% in several other states during the economic slowdown. Is this buying spree an indication that a section of Biharis have more money to splurge than they did earlier? “A few people had money earlier too, but they didn’t flaunt it for fear of attracting extortionists and kidnappers,” says Ranjit Singh, director of a high-end Patna hotel. That fear may have evaporated now.
* Only 317 kidnappings for ransom were reported during the last four years as against 1,393 during the previous four. The kidnapping industry has clearly fallen on hard times. One indication of this is that doctors no longer refuse to go to patients’ homes on emergency calls. “Today you can see boards at clinics saying we go on calls,” says Dr Amulya Kumar Singh, who runs a nursing home in Patna.
* Most of Bihar’s infamous dons are behind bars. That includes Mohd Shahabuddin, the former RJD MP who had once gone live on TV, daring the state police chief to arrest him. Things are a little different now. A ruling JD(U) MLA, Sunil Pandey, attempted an encore of sorts in early 2006 when he brandished a revolver and talked murder on TV. But Pandey found himself behind bars within no time. Speedy trials have ensured a total of 38,824 convictions between 2006 and September 2009.The convicts included dons and their henchmen.
* Gun-toting strongmen are no longer a common sight on the streets of Bihar. Policemen patrol them now. And places like Siwan, where Shahabuddin once held sway, do not get deserted after dusk.
This improvement has shown results. Malls, shops and private educational institutions are coming up. So are mobile service providers and banking firms. It’s boom time for real estate with apartment buildings coming up all around. “That’s because even non-Biharis for a change want to have a foot in Bihar which has become a better place to live in,” says economist Shaibal Gupta of the Asian Development Research Institute. Adds Faizal Alam of Kalyanpur Cements, “Cement inflow to the state went up 18% to 51 lakh tonnes in 2008-09.” That’s an indicator of the construction boom.
Ironically, this economic growth has happened without any worthwhile contribution from the manufacturing sector. The state’s economy is growing because of a boom in agriculture and services sectors. “It’s government-induced growth,” admits Bihar Industries Association (BIA) president S P Sinha. According to former BIA president K P S Keshri, private investments in the manufacturing sector have been as little as Rs 1,500 crore during the last four years.
Many attribute the growth to the fact that the flow of Central funds to states has increased manifold in recent years. In the case of Bihar, it went up from Rs 37,341 crore during the five-year period 2000-2005 to Rs 55,459 crore during the next three years. But equally importantly, the funds are now getting better utilized than during the Lalu-Rabri regime when large chunks remained unspent. Also, adds Gupta, the state made concerted efforts to mobilise internal resources with its own revenue collection going up from Rs 2,919 crore in 2003-04 to Rs 5,256 crore in 2008-09.
The flip side is that much of this growth does not get reflected in social indicators which remain abysmal. But, as Gupta says, it would be unrealistic for anyone to “expect the moon” at this stage. “Right now the fundamentals are getting corrected and therefore you can find mostly infrastructural indicators of growth; one will have to wait for social indicators to become visible,” he says.
While contractors and realtors stand to gain, more than half the state’s 8.2 crore people — 1.25 crore families — still live below the poverty line. For these families to prosper, Bihar desperately needs huge investments and more growth. The State Investment Promotion Board, formed by the Nitish government, has received proposals worth Rs 96,000 crore. But most of them, especially the major ones, remain on paper as Central rules prove a stumbling block. For instance, thermal power plants cannot come up in Bihar because the Centre has so far refused to provide coal linkages to ensure regular supplies to any such new plant.
Also, Bihar has a lot of catching up to do with the rest of India. “There cannot be any comparison between Gujarat and Bihar, both of which reportedly grew by over 11%; since our base is low, even a small investment results in impressive growth in percentage,” Gupta points out. State officials admit that crucial sectors like health are still sick with meagre resources in comparison to other states.
From its bleak past, Bihar may be finally moving towards a brighter future, but the common Bihari is not patting himself just yet. Maybe he is still waiting for this high growth to translate into better food on his table and more money in his pocket.
Link:- Times of India 10-01-2010
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
ET Awards 2008-09: Business Reformer of the Year- Nitish Kumar
Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar is the Economic Times Business Reformer of the Year. The jury members were unanimous in their choice, giving Mr Nitish Kumar, Chief Minister, Bihar.Mr.Kumar’s performance a higher rating than Delhi chief minister Sheila Dixit.
The national calamity in Bihar following the Kosi river changing its course highlights the state of affairs in Bihar, once rated as the best in administration. Since taking over as the state chief minister, Nitish Kumar has been trying to rebuild the system of governance that has virtually broken down.
When the Janata Dal (United)-BJP alliance came to power in Bihar in 2005, it was heralded as the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the state.
Ending Lalu Prasad Yadav family’s 15-year reign, Nitish Kumar became the chief minister, with a promise to turn the state around. Three years on, Mr Kumar seems to be on track, although Bihar might take a while to show results.
The JD (U) leader, who is often referred to as the state’s last hope, wants to make Bihar a developed state by 2015. Bihar being primarily an agricultural state, Mr Kumar has been stressing on agro-based industries.
He believes this will help in keeping land acquisition to a minimum. The chief minister has gone to the extent of saying that he does not want SEZs in the state and his government has identified agro-processing, handloom and textiles, handicrafts, pharmaceuticals and leather as areas with comparative advantage.
The other areas where he has made a good start are employment generation and infrastructure development. He beat other states to put in place an employment-guarantee programme for agricultural labourers, which promises 80 days of work, in addition to the 100 days mandated by the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme.
His government has adopted a new poverty measurement method, so that a bulk of the families living below the poverty line could be identified and have schemes targeted at them. His goal to develop roads in Bihar has been tagged to a three-year timeline, by when he hopes to have Bihar rival the best road networks in India.
Even on the administrative front, there are several big tasks waiting for his attention. For almost 15 years, Bihar didn’t even have a proper budget.
Mr Kumar has also identified promotion of investment opportunities as equally important. With poor infrastructure and the absence of long-term policies hindering private investment, he has kickstarted a series of legislative and administrative reforms. A new industrial policy was put in place in 2006, as was the Bihar Infrastructure Development Enabling Act. A new policy for the sugar processing sector — an important crop in the state — was also brought in.
The new industrial policy makes land available at concessional rates and promises reimbursement of 80% of VAT deposited. And these initiatives seem to have paid off, with the government receiving proposals from a number of big sugar manufacturers. An industrial complex with sugar mills, ethanol and power generation plants has been cleared. Measures to revive the textile industry have also been pushed through. With the state relying almost entirely on the Centre for its power needs, Bihar plans to put up new thermal and hydel power plants.
25 Aug 2009, 0547 hrs IST, ET Bureau
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Features/ET-Awards-2008-09-Business-Reformer-of-the-Year-Nitish-Kumar/articleshow/4931000.cms?curpg=2
Bihar grew by 11.03%, next only to Gujarat
Bihar is India's new miracle economy. In the five-year period between 2004-05 and 2008-09, Bihar's GDP has grown by a stunning 11.03%, way beyond the definition of 7% growth for a ``miracle economy''.
In this period, Bihar - traditionally a laggard state that actually saw a 5.15% negative growth in 2003-04 - is the second fastest growing state, just a shade behind Gujarat's well-publicized growth of 11.05%.
The latest CSO data gives out this dramatic story of Bihar on steroids. This high growth period also coincides with Nitish Kumar taking up the reins as chief minister from Lalu Yadav. It can, therefore, be said that good governance can work miracles for even the most backward of states. Not just Bihar, most of the traditionally backward states, including Orissa, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, have done well in this period, indicating a more inclusive growth at an all-India level.
There is no official data on poverty beyond 2004-05. So, the CSO data on the economic growth of the states, highlighting the fact that five of India's most backward states have grown at a rate beyond 7%, provides pointers to some kind of poverty mitigation. Apart from Bihar, the growth rate of the other four are: Uttarakhand 9.31%, Orissa 8.74% and Jharkhand 8.45%. The all-India growth during this period was 8.49%.
TNN 3 January 2010, 12:48am IST
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/biz/india-business/Bihar-grew-by-1103-next-only-to-Gujarat/articleshow/5405973.cms
