Ask Laloo and he says it’s just an ‘image problem’

Why have his father Paritosh Bhattacharya and 40,000 other employees of the Bihar State government not been paid their dues for almost a decade?
Ever since I was a student at Patna’s Miller School, our teachers called corporations rightly as white elephants. The 40,000 employees that you describe as unpaid for a decade, including Paritosh Bhattacharya, are corporation employees, not pure state government employees. All state government employees in Bihar are paid their salaries regularly.

All the 50 corporations in Bihar are independent legal entities. Previous chairmen kept recruiting employees. This was a burden my government had to shoulder.

In 1996-97, some employees went to Patna High Court on the grounds of not getting their salaries. The court ordered either revive the corporations in three months time or failing that simply liquidate them.

Since you failed to revive them, why did you not liquidate them?
If we sell the corporations, their land and other assets the CBI will immediately pounce on us. They will create a scandal even if there is no such case. Moreover, the liquidation procedures are very complex and cumbersome. Who will buy the land and along with it the liabilities, ie, the employees?

How can you dismiss this as just a legacy of the past? Your party has now been in power for 12 years. Is it because most of those who haven’t been paid are from upper castes?
It’s not true that I do not care for the upper castes. The Mandal agenda and our struggle for the rights of the backwards gave vent to the anger of the poor against the privileged few. There are no feudal elements in Bihar; the majority, whether upper or lower castes, are simply dirt poor. I care for everyone.

If you cared for everyone then why is it that on almost all indicators of development Bihar is at the bottom of the heap?
Our detractors claim that Bihar is underdeveloped because of Laloo and Rabri. When we began development, I was simply pushed into jail. I end up spending all my time either in jail or in courts.

Bihar is poor because no Central government has ever invested in the state’s infrastructure. North Bihar has one of the highest densities of populations in the world and simply no industry. The entire pressure is on land and thousands of hectares are washed away by floods every year.

Centre can be blamed but isn’t education a state subject? How come college professors and school teachers have not been paid for months?
Previous CMs Karpoori Thakur, Jagannath Mishra and Bindeswari Dubey are responsible for such a state of affairs. They took huts and flats all over the state and called them colleges. None of these satisfied any norms. They did not even take the permission of the finance ministry. The result is while the rest of the country has 5,000 professors, Bihar alone has 8,000. How can we bear such a huge burden?

We found professors of Patna University haven’t been paid for months.
I don’t believe this.

Other states are competing with each other on governance, why do you seem so unconcerned?
Most CMs know how to manage the media. Take Naidu’s case, the media calls him the governance hero while farmers are committing suicide in his state.