Bihar's half revolution

The research is meticulous and extensive.

- ADITI PHADNIS

The analysis of how Bihar slid into a development morass and then tried to climb out of it is penetrating and perceptive. Caste rules everything, ranging from intellectual pursuit to crime in Bihar, and in this book, too, a caste slant creeps in almost unseen and possibly inadvertently.

The book is organised as a political history of the state. So Pataliputra, the centre of the all-India empire of the Maurya dynasty, the establishment of universities such as Nalanda and Vikramshila; the home of mathematicians and scientists such as Aryabhata; the birthplace of two seminal religions that challenged caste orthodoxy, Buddhism and Jainism; and the development of Sher Shah Suri's Grand Trunk Road that passed through Bihar, is discussed.

But how could a state that had all that come to this? A 2012 paper by two academics is quoted by the author. It explains how the land revenue system called Permanent Settlement introduced by Lord Cornwallis (1793) delinked revenue from agricultural output and proved to be a disincentive to improve agricultural productivity. This was in contrast to the Ryotwari system in the Madras and Bombay provinces that led to capital formation and investment in agri-productivity, catapulting both regions as centres of industrialisation.

The Freight Equalisation Policy between 1952 and 1993 also had a role to play in depriving Bihar of the comparative advantage it could have had in developing value-added activities and mineral-based industries. As a result, Bihar's gross domestic product (GDP) remained heavily dependent on agriculture and, overtime, land became virtually the only factor of production.