Bihar, now

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.