WHY THE ONLY WAY AHEAD IS DEVELOPMENT

Nitish Kumar has tried to shift Bihar’s political focus from identity affiliations to social deliverance. Good governance needs to take the BIMARU tag off one of India’s most backward states

- VINAY SAHASRABUDDHE

THIS November's assembly election will be the first in Bihar after the untimely demise of two Biharis who, in their respective fields, sig nificantly contributed in taking the discourse around viksit or developed Bihar to a different level. One is Sushil Kumar Modi and the other is Shaibal Gupta, founder and member-secretary of the Asian Development Research Institute in Patna. While Gupta was an economist, Modi took the practitioner's track as one of the state's longest serving finance ministers.

The question today is whether Bihar will continue down the development politics path, or go back to identity politics of castes and communities. What Gupta, a visionary scholar, had said about a quarter century ago is worth recalling even today. Venting his agony, he wrote in a monograph: "Let the Bihari sub-nationalism write a new script. It will be mediated with an eye for the national and global markets.

This is only possible by forging a new identity in an atmosphere of a resurgent Bihar, wherein we can give befitting reply to all the existing clichés about Bihar's identity, which generally conceptualises corruption and misrule as being synonymous to the state." Striving for all-encompassing development was the only way to liberate Bihar from corruption and misrule. It followed that Nitish Kumar made good governance a political plank and, over the years, people identified him as 'Sushasan babu'. His approach reflected what a World Bank report titled 'Bihar: Towards a Development Strategy' had advocated. The 2006 report suggested 'strategic efforts' in five areas: improving the state's investment climate; administration and procedural reforms; better design and delivery of core social services; budget management and fiscal reforms; and prioritising law and order.