Again a perceptive article in the Indian Express by Pamella
Phillipose. It seems we all can only lament what is happening in Bihar
but nothing to look forward to.

The link to the article is:

http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=63712
rajesh

Bihar, now
This state needs to be mainstreamed — for India's sake
PAMELA PHILIPOSE
Posted online: Monday, January 31, 2005 at 0000 hours IST


Metropolitan India has numerous ways to swat Bihar. Take the old joke:
"Yaar, we should agree to give J&K to the Pakistanis if they agree to
take Bihar as well." So static is the big picture of the state that
news agencies are known to recycle old pictures of floods and
massacres as fresh images without anyone being the wiser. But if Bihar
is the heart of darkness, it is the heart of ur darkness. The state is
too populous, too central, to be excised from the collective
consciousness.

As Bihar goes in for assembly elections, Arvind Das's argument comes
back with new meaning. Writing in 2000 before the last assembly
elections in the state, Das despaired over the fate of his 'republic
of Bihar'. He decried the tendency of third world capitalism — riding
on archaic land relations and outmoded cultural practices — to destroy
without having the vitality to create anew; a capitalism that did not
bring about "modernity" but merely combined the worst of agrarian
pre-modernity with post-industrial post-modernity. He despaired over
the state's politicians, mere time-servers concerned solely with the
capture of power and the creation of personal empires. A little later,
in a comment written just before his own death, he talked about Bihar
as a society whose sensibilities have long atrophied through years of
violence; a society rife with heterogeneous beings constituting
mutually exclusive and hostile groups which prey on each other; a
society where poverty has degraded culture and the culture of poverty
has fragmented and brutalised society. The indifference towards Bihar
that India displayed made Das wonder whether there was a plan afoot to
convert the state into a mere catchment area for labour to service the
rest of the nation.

Nobody expects the coming elections to change anything in the state
and nothing signifies that as much as the election discourse. Laloo
Prasad Yadav has long discovered that roads as smooth as Hema Malini's
cheeks are not even necessary to invoke when he can keep summoning the
genie of "social justice" to deliver the state to him — a phrase which
once held some transformative potential but which has now long been
emptied by cynical political practice of any promise of social
transformation or justice delivery. His opponents are so subsumed by
the gargantuan presence of Laloo himself that they do him the favour
of failing to summon a credible electoral rhetoric, forget crafting an
alternative politics. As a result you have the supreme irony of a
politically conscious electorate — Bihar has always reported a high
turnout of voters of around 60 per cent for both state and national
elections from '89 to '04 — in patent need of substantive social and
economic transformation locked in an echo chamber of meaningless
slogans.

Apart from the serious anomalies of its politics, the state has also
been served poorly by the political economy of the '90s. As R.
Radhakrishna and Shovan Ray have pointed out in the latest indian
Development Report, the '90s benefited urban areas the most and
aggravated rural-urban disparities. It was a decade which witnessed
the rural bottom 30 per cent see a decline in the annual growth rate
of per capita expenditure. In the process the percentage share of
"backward" states like Orissa, MP, UP and Bihar in the rural poor rose
from 53 per cent in '93-94 to 61 per cent in '99.

The grinding down factor of the poverty cycle — powered by deeply
entrenched caste and feudal hierarchies — punishes in extraordinary
ways. Take healthcare. Studies show that in a state like Bihar, the
poorest tenth of the population ended up spending over 200 per cent of
annual per capita consumption expenditure on health. It is ironical
that those who can afford to fall ill the least end up being hobbled
by incapacitating disease and disability, which in turn sends entire
families into a tailspin of multiple deprivations. You also have the
ultimate irony of those earning the least forced into spending the
most on healthcare. The poor housed in hovels — NFHS-2 data reveal
only 18.2 per cent of households in Bihar have electricity, 16.8 per
cent have latrines, and 15.5 per cent live in pucca houses — are much
more susceptible to even those diseases that have largely been
eradicated elsewhere in the country.

'Raising the Sights: Better Health Systems for India's Poor', a World
Bank study, notes that the prevalence rate for leprosy in Bihar was 50
per cent higher than the all-India state average for men and women
below the poverty line and the prevalence rates for scheduled castes
was twice the state average. It is against this that one should note
that the Bihar government's per capita spending on health is the
lowest in the country. The state has only 2 per 1,000 population in
terms of public sector hospitalisations. Kerala, in contrast,
registers 29.

Each deprivation ends up creating or accentuating another. Bihar is,
in addition, the site of floods. Its most backward districts tend also
to be the most flood-prone. Bibek Debroy and Laveesh Bhandari, in
their survey of district level deprivation, highlighted the
asset-stripping effect of recurring floods, which they believe are
even more pernicious than drought because they don't just disrupt,
they destroy life, property and infrastructure that take years to
build and accumulate.

The cynical politics of Bihar is played out against this tragic
backdrop. Nobody has taken responsibility for this patent evisceration
of a people. While the Rabri Devi government blames years of Central
neglect, the Centre claims that funds earmarked for the state end up
fattening the only tribe that has prospered in the state — the
politically empowered contractor mafia. Bihar needs to remove itself
from this point-counterpoint trap as it does from a politics that
pushes ever larger groups of people into the abyss. Bihar needs
mainstreaming. But where does this project begin? It's a question our
best minds and talent needs to be engaged with because if Bihar
continues to be forgotten, India will continue to remain divided
against itself with significant regional disparities short-circuiting
sustainable growth.

As we hyperventilate over the report of the National Intelligence
Council of the CIA projecting this country as a major global power by
2020, it will be wise to remember that according to present estimates
Bihar is unlikely to make its demographic transition to replacement
levels before 2050 and that it could take almost a century before the
state can claim something as basic as universal literacy. Bihar today
has another name: Now.