DTN News - INSIGHT BIHAR STATE ~ INDIA NEWS: From Darkest India, An Enlightened Leader
(NSI News Source Info) TORONTO, Canada - February 5, 2012: There's an apocryphal story about Bihar, a sprawling state on the Gangetic plains of eastern India that for decades held the dubious honor of being the most violent, poverty-stricken and corrupt in the land.
A Japanese minister visiting in the 1990s, shocked at the decrepit buildings, the darkness at night even in the centre of town and the crumbling roads, declared that it was all solvable.
"Give me three years," he told a state leader, "and I can turn Bihar into Japan."
"That's nothing," came the laconic reply from his host. "Give me three days and I will turn Japan into Bihar."
Bihar is no longer the butt of jokes, however, not since Nitish Kumar took charge of the ruined state in 2005 and began to turn it around -- winning such respect that he stands a decent chance of one day becoming prime minister of India.
"My first priority was governance, my second priority was governance and my third priority was governance," Chief Minister Kumar told Reuters at his office in the state capital, Patna, a dusty city where property prices have soared to levels paid in far away New Delhi, even as its streets teem with the desperately poor.
"Bihar suffered not because of bad governance but because of a lack of governance."
When India launched reforms to open up its state-stifled economy 20 years ago, many states surged ahead, leaving behind the 3.5 percent "Hindu rate of growth" that had plagued the decades after the country's independence from Britain in 1947, and with it Bihar.
