A Week in Bihar

A Week in Bihar

Mokama Railway Station

We left the four-lane highway east from Patna at Bakhtiarpur, and the road carved a path through a village of thatched huts, of teetering piles of straw. In a small field strewn with translucent plastic bags and cowdung cakes, barefooted children played among grazing cattle and goats. In the narrow spaces between home and road, men soaked in the warmth of the early sun.

The fields were green with maize and vegetables, grey with the dust that hung in the air, and tiny. These are the size of kitchen gardens, I thought. This, rolling by my window, is the population density of Bihar; this is a visual of a state that cannot feed its people, of a people, half of whose children are malnourished.

The chimneys of brick kilns rose between us and the Ganga, gashes in the sand filled with dark water, and bordered with piles of unfired bricks, the rolling banks of the Ganga appearing through brief slits in the foreground, then disappearing to another clump of bamboo, another haystack, another cluster of crooked roofs and thatch walls, mile upon mile of living corridors pressing in on the road.

Kumar, my traveling companion, discussed the route with our driver, and I heard the name Mokama. "Let's stop there", I asked, recalling that a hero of my own Kumaon had spent several years working at the Mokama railway station. Outside the Station Manager's office, a plaque informed us that he had been a fuel inspector at the Mokama Ghat station, down by the banks of the Ganga. Before a bridge across the Ganga was built, the railway tracks stopped here; goods and people headed east, towards Calcutta, were transhipped onto boats.

 "A reminder that inland waterways were viable until less than a century ago", Kumar observed.

Jim Corbett at Mokama

In the vast, slow waters of the wintering Ganga, a small flotilla of barges and earth movers were at work constructing two new bridges, and NH 31 pushed east, past the Barauni refinery, once again a four-lane highway, attracting a rash of construction, of auto dealers and transporters, of roadside restaurants and cheap hotels. But, other than the vast edifices of the Barauni complex, we saw not one factory, not one sign of private industrial enterprise in the three hundred kilometers we drove that day.

We reached the eastern-most district of Purnea in time for a cup of chai at Gulab Bagh, sipped on the wooden 'gaddi' of a maize trader. Bihar had repealed the APMC* act in 2006, and while the traders and farmers we met cheered the freedom from the clutches of the mandi samiti, Kumar and I discussed research findings that showed farmers in remote areas had suffered as smaller mandis had shut down; they now needed to travel longer distances to market their produce. From Purnea, though, maize merchants spoke of trades measured in rakes - entire freight trains - carrying maize to mills in the west and south of India. 

"Why not process the maize here?" 

"Who will set up a factory in Bihar?" the trader asked.

It was a rhetorical question, born of the lived experience that businesses have shown little interest in setting up plants in Bihar. But it was also a genuine question we asked several people over the three days we spent in Patna. When 70% of a state's population depend on agriculture, they are locked in a cycle of tiny, fragmented holdings, low levels of capital and technology, and low productivity. Migration of unskilled labour to the rest of the nation is not a viable route to prosperity for 130 million people. The state needs to attract industry and modern services, if it is to stand a chance of catching up even with its neighbours, West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh.

After a week in Bihar, Anand Kumar and I believe we have a host of questions to answer with data and more interviews, that will help us posit some hypotheses about the parlous state of Bihar's economy. He has a disciplined approach towards the enquiry, and I hope to be able to help develop a short paper on our findings - which I will post here.

In the interim, I will take a three week break from Substack, as I take a holiday in south and south east Asia with my wife. Have a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year.

*Agricultural Produce Market Commitee. Under the APMC Act, farmers were obliged to sell all produce in mandis governed by the stipulations of the law. This created artificial barriers to trade, and empowered those traders with seats in the APMC yards, or mandi samitis.