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| Changes visible, but a lot remains to be done |
| Aditi Phadnis / New Delhi Jan 02, 2010, 00:43 IST |
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Though CM has shown confidence, Bihar is still not getting private sector investment.
In November 2005, Nitish Kumar became the chief minister of Bihar. But for him, 2006 started on a dismal note. On December 31, 2005, one of the star winners of the Janata Dal-United (JD-U)-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) alliance in the Assembly elections, Navin Chandra Sinha, died of heart attack. Sinha had won from Patna and had the highest winning margin among all the MLAs in the Assembly. As a sitting MLA, he was entitled to a state funeral. Kumar ordered that all the arrangements be made, including a five-gun salute.
Picture the scene. Sinha’s relatives were sobbing. His supporters stood grimly as the body lay in state, awaiting the salute. Five guns were required to fire in the air. The first round went off perfectly. But in the second round, three rifles jammed and merely responded with an empty ‘click’ when fired. Policemen scurried to get rifles that would work. In the third and fourth rounds, only two rifles fired. In the fifth round, all the rifles jammed, so bystanders ‘saw’ rather than heard the rifles firing. “I felt so terrible. Many in the crowd of mourners were laughing at the incident,” said Kumar while recounting the event.
For Nitish Kumar, that was a function of total absence of governance in Bihar. The chief minister’s secretariat worked with the help of a few aged Remington typewriters. There was no facility for conference call. It needed a meeting of the Cabinet to get departments spend Rs 25 lakh. There was a reason why not to do something. Doing things or showing initiative was strongly discouraged.
Ever since he has taken charge of the state, Kumar has changed some of this mindset. The biggest problem was law and order. Bihar’s ‘best known’ business was the kidnapping industry. Gangs got political protection and operated with impunity. Safety was a bigger priority than development — what was the use of development if physically, people did not feel secure?
Kumar took two steps — he used the Arms Act, under which the testimony of an SHO is enough to put an individual carrying an unlicenced weapon behind bars, to lock up strongmen, as they are known in Bihar; and second, he made sure the rate of conviction went up. In other words, he made it known that there were no holy cows in Bihar any more.
A team of 11,000 retired army personnel was raised which later supplemented the state government’s law enforcement efforts. One does not hear big-scale crime any more. Besides, the migration of the labour class as well as qualified professionals like doctors and engineers has been halted.
Four years ago, there were just two flights a day between Patna and Delhi. Today, there are as many as seven flights between these two cities. There are five daily flights between Kolkata and Patna now, against a mere two earlier.
In addition, Bihar has an international airport in Gaya because of its proximity to Bodhgaya, a major centre for Buddhist pilgrims. Four years ago, there were practically no international flights — the odd chartered flight would come once a week. Today, 25 flights touch down at this airport every week from places like Bangkok, Colombo and Yangon.
Improved law and order situation is also resulting in development. The government is spending on roads and infrastructure as well, and has kept aside Rs 5,000 crore for roads development for just one year. Bihar has become one of the largest consumers of cement. Its year-on-year growth in cement consumption is 27 per cent, compared to the national average growth of 9 per cent.
However, what Bihar lacks is private sector investment. This is leading Kumar to demand that the state be given special status for tax sops that will help attract the attention of industry to invest here. But the Centre has not given its approval yet. Gradually, this seems to be one of the core issues in the forthcoming Assembly elections, to be held in the last quarter of 2010.
On the negative side, the chief minister has a lot of political problems. During the Lok Sabha elections last year, Kumar campaigned using the helicopters lent to him by ally BJP because his own party showed neither the initiative nor the foresight to book planes in advance. Finally, it was a question of either taking the BJP’s help or not campaigning at all. However, it was Kumar’s personal appeal that the party managed to win 20 seats in the Lok Sabha elections.
His relationship with the BJP tends to be rocky and this is something that suits him just fine. Kumar’s plank continues to be winning the support of the most backward. This includes the most backward Muslims. Although there have been cases where the Muslims too have voted for the BJP to ensure Kumar’s victory, he has to maintain a visible distance, not just from the BJP but its policies and programmes as well.
Though the Assembly elections are quite far, odds are in the favour of Nitish Kumar. The question is what he will do in his second innings.
If he returns to power, there is another step that Kumar has to take: getting the border problems relating to natural resources like water resolved by ensuring that the Centre acts on the issue. Barely had the state recovered from the floods of 2008, it was struck by a similar calamity in 2009. Much of the problem is the lack of water management in Nepal. This is something that can be resolved only through diplomatic persuasion.
True, the JD-U’s performance in the September by-elections in Bihar was less than edifying — it got just three seats against the Lalu Prasad-led Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), which got eight seats out of the 18 that went to the polls. But this might not be a trend. For the sake of Bihar, everyone should hope it isn’t.
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