Can Bihar Condemned To Be A Basket Case?

Can Bihar Condemned To Be A Basket Case?

Bihar has been in the news for the last few days and India Tracker has already featured two stories on the state. The first looked at electoral data since 2000 to analyse the rise and decline of the Janata Dal (United), the party run by chief minister Nitish Kumar. The second story was based on a nationwide survey  to gauge what Indians thought about the seemingly imminent break up between the JD(U) and the BJP. In the coming days and perhaps weeks, scores of pundits will give their “expert” opinion on the developments as they unfold. But since the mandate of India Tacker is to look at only data, we will not be contributing our bit to the raucous and bitter debates that are bound to follow. Rather, India Tracker takes a close look at the development parameters of Bihar to find out how bad the situation is in the state.

Data suggests that the situation is very grim. Citizens of Bihar are deprived even of basic social and physical infrastructure that is now available in hitherto poor states. This sorry state of affairs was revealed late last year when the Niti Ayog released its first Report on multi dimensional poverty in India. Instead of taking household expenditure or income as the measure of poverty, Niti Ayog, selected 12 parameters ranging from nutrition, cooking fuel, sanitation, access to electricity and bank accounts among others to arrive at a more meaningful measure of poverty. Going by income, the poverty rate estimated by the World Bank in India is less than 12%. But the Niti Ayog method estimates actual poverty for India as a whole to be 25.01%. But the data coming out of Bihar is shocking, as the first chart indicates in a brutal manner. At the turn of the century, Odisha competed with Bihar to be the poorest state in India. Now, with a Niti Ayog poverty count of 29.35, Odisha is now miles ahead of Bihar that has a poverty count of 51.91%. Forget about states like Tamil Nadu with a poverty count that is less than 5%. Clearly, there is something seriously wrong in Bihar and no one is solving the crisis.

The second chart reflects the pathetic conditions in which large sections of Bihar continue to live. The Central government has spent tens of thousands of crores in providing basic amenities like nutrition, sanitation, cooking fuel, electricity, housing and bank accounts. Yet, 50.2% lack access to cooking fuel, 46.5% to sanitation (whatever happened to Swacchh Bharat in Bihar?) and 47.1% to housing. Despite the massive push to open Jan Dhan accounts, 19.6% of people in Bihar lack access to a bank account. Once upon a time, analysts would blame the “jungle raj” under Lalu Yadav for the sorry state of affairs in Bihar. But the BJP and the JD(U) have been by and large ruling the state for 17 years. Chief Minister Nitish was also famous for being “Susashan Babu”. Data suggests something else.