The Rediff Special/B G Verghese

Bihar's savings, like its migrant labour, goes outside the state

Bihar is watered by great rivers and has rich groundwater resources other than in the plateau area. This includes a potential very deep aquifer supposedly under artesian pressure that awaits exploration. In the old days the zamindars built and maintained ahars and pynes or small irrigation and flood protection works in their own self interest.

With zamindari abolition, these so-called fard-i-pasi schemes as well as of flood embankments were 'nationalised' and soon deteriorated for lack of maintenance. Some of the new water resource programmes after Independence consequently provided little net addition to irrigation as they merely substituted these traditional works. Hundreds of derelict fard-i-pasi works were restored during the great famine of 1966-67 when, amazingly, Bihar and Eastern UP 'discovered' groundwater to everybody's great surprise!

I travelled extensively through Bihar during that period and found an expansive patch of lush green amongst the scorched brown fields that confronted the eye everywhere. This was in the Kosi Command which had been brought under irrigation and flood protection as a result of the Kosi project. The command area authority was then under a dynamic officer and the sight offered striking demonstration of the transformation that could be effected in north Bihar through the regulation and management of water. Having witnessed the tremendous havoc wrought by the great Kosi floods during a relief expedition in the winter of 1944, the change was striking. There were signs of renewal and hope. This was short-lived.

The Kosi irrigation system was designed without thought of land levelling, drainage and agrarian reform. The sandy wasteland caused by the Kosi through coarse sand deposition over decades had created an undulating topography. The high ground could not be irrigated by gravity flow while the depressions remained stagnant swamps. Over-irrigation without construction of drainage outfalls aggravated the problem. In the absence of groundwater lift or the conjunctive use of surface and ground water, the inevitable result was waterlogging.

Bataidars were denied any security of tenure but called upon to bear all risks and yet part with half or more of the harvest. They were understandably reluctant to make any permanent improvements. Should they do so, they feared the rapacity of their landlords who would not hesitate to appropriate the improved plots and allocate them another patch of unproductive land the following year. Nor did they have the wherewithal to make major investments.

Maintenance of the canal network was also neglected, as elsewhere in Bihar, with the result that the system soon deteriorated, got clogged with silt and overflowed, adding to waterlogging. Several years down the line, things had only worsened. Both kharif and rabi irrigation remained well below the designed potential. A third of the command was perhaps waterlogged and 20 per cent of the canal network choked with silt. With flood protection and some modest production, landlords were content with capital appreciation.

The Gandak project too failed to reach its potential for largely similar reasons.

Industrially, Bihar has seemingly everything going for it, with its mineral-rich endowment. But apart from whatever was there at the time of Independence and the Barauni, Bokaro and heavy engineering complexes, new mines, washeries and thermal power stations, mostly in the central public sector, there is little to show. The sugar industry has been in decline. With the discovery of oil in the 1960s and 1970s, national attention shifted from coal to hydrocarbons. And the policy of freight equalisation neutralised Bihar's location advantage in relation to metallurgical and engineering industries until its reversal fairly recently.

Given their external capital, entrepreneurship, personnel characteristics and limited linkages, except within a closed loop, these industrial and mining centres have developed as enclaves with a limited impact on the surrounding region. A shortage of local capital has sometimes been pleaded, but Bihar suffers from a poor credit-deposit ratio. Its savings, like its migrant labour, goes outside the state. When business and industry moved out of West Bengal during the Naxalite years, Bihar could have been an obvious alternative. Sadly it was not. It simply was not ready or able.

Mr Verghese's comments form part of the Kedar Nath Singh Memorial Lecture which he delivered in Chhapra, Bihar, recently.

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