A chink in Bihar’s glittering growth

The outcome of the Bihar Assembly elections will be known on November 24, but if opinion polls and conventional political wisdom are to be believed, there is a strong possibility that the Janata Dal (United)-Bharatiya Janata Party coalition led by incumbent chief minister Nitish Kumar will return to power. If indeed he is re-elected, he would become the first chief minister after Lalu Prasad Yadav to return to the seat of power in Patna after completing a full term of five years.
And, if indeed Mr Kumar becomes the most important politician in Bihar for another five years, the jury would certainly proclaim that the people of what is considered one of the most backward states in India have voted for economic development and good governance. The question is whether the JD(U)-BJP government has been able to enable Bihar to embark on a dizzyingly fast growth path that rivals Gujarat’s recent track record. The answer, unfortunately for the state government, is that the improvement seen in terms of growth indicators alone — not necessarily the best indicators to measure economic development, leave alone human development — has been marginal at best, and pretty skewed at worst.
Irrespective of the outcome of the polls, it is worth examining the state’s economic performance over the recent past. A recent paper written by Praveen Jha, associate professor, and Atul Kumar Singh, research scholar, of the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, has sought to de-mystify the claims that have been made in the media of late about Bihar’s so-called growth “miracle” and arrived at the conclusion that there’s more hype than substance to the claims that have been made about the state being on the smooth (like Hema Malini’s cheeks) road to a major economic revival.
In early-January, there were a series of reports in various newspapers and television channels about how the rate of growth of Bihar’s gross state domestic product (GSDP) had jumped during Mr Kumar’s tenure as chief minister. It was pointed out that the state’s economy had grown by 11.03 per cent on an average each financial year, between 2004-05 and 2008-09. The source of information was the Central Statistical Organisation (CSO) in the ministry of statistics and programme implementation in the Government of India. What the researchers discovered was that this figure was sharply at variance with the data contained in the Bihar government’s own annual state economic survey documents.
The state government’s own statistics indicated that the annual average rate of growth of GSDP during the four-year period was only 7.03 per cent, implying a variance of as much as nearly 40 per cent from the figures attributed to the CSO. As in the case of the Union government, the figures of GSDP put out by all state governments (including the Bihar government) are revised a number of times. “Advance” estimates become “quick” estimates, then “provisional” ones before the data become “final”, the gap between “advance” and “final” often being two years or more. But the point to note here is that these revisions should not, under normal circumstances, lead to such a huge divergence of almost 40 per cent.
What is important is that the Bihar government’s official documents reported that for the three fiscal years between 2005-06 and 2008-09, the average annual growth rate was 6.35 per cent, which does not compare that favourably with the figure of 5.87 per cent that was attained between 2000-01 and 2004-05, that is, during a four-year period during which Bihar was largely ruled by the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) government headed by Rabri Devi. “Thus, a difference of about 0.5 per cent in the annual growth rates attained over last four years of (the) RJD-led government and first four years of the current government can hardly constitute the basis of the claims of a miraculous turnaround in Bihar’s economy”, observed the paper by Mr Jha and Mr Singh, adding that the “abnormal statistical difference may well be on account of reporting biases by concerned officials and for reasons more ‘political’ than ‘economic’”.
The paper pointed out that even the non-economic data put out by the state government does not exactly paint a rosy picture of the prevailing law and order situation in Bihar. Official figures of the department of home of the state government show that the total number of cognisable crimes committed in the state during the first two years of the Nitish Kumar government went up by 15 per cent. The paper stated: “…while number of kidnappings in the state went down, during the above-mentioned period, the number of rapes witnessed a substantial increase. While the fall in the cases of kidnapping has positively brought about a sense of security, particularly among the business class, an increase in the number of rapes (is)… disturbing…”
The paper by Mr Jha and Mr Singh has highlighted glaring anomalies in the data relating to agricultural production. Income from the farm sector has been revised upwards “inexplicably” during the year in which the river Kosi wreaked havoc across large areas of the state. It has been further contended that the economic growth that has taken place has been largely confined to the construction industry, while agriculture (which employs over three-fourths of the workforce in a state where over 95 per cent of the cultivators are small, marginal or landless) continues to languish. In fact, there has been a fall in the real incomes of a substantial section of the peasantry, the paper has stated.
The fact that Bihar’s current economic performance has not exactly improved markedly may not significantly influence the electoral outcome. On the contrary, if the votes polled get deeply divided along three or four political combines — JD(U)-BJP, RJD-Lok Janshakti Party, Indian National Congress and the Left — the verdict could well favour the ruling regime irrespective of the perceived or real importance of the issues that may or may not exert an influence on voting patterns. That may be truly ironical.

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta is an educator and commentator