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Bihar is lost in time and was let to sink for centuries - both under British rule and during most of the Republic. The region whose cities dazzled the world had its lights turn off. Pataliputra’s grandeur would amaze the Greeks who visited there. It is a shadow of its past. Gaya enlighted the Siddharta and turned him into a Buddha. It doesn’t now have much more than pilgrims offering puja. Nalanda used to attract scholars across the world and was the Harvard of its time. Now, not a single college/university in Bihar attracts other Indians, leave alone the world. What Bihar first needs is a major metropolis. If you take out Mumbai from Maharashtra, Bangalore from Karnataka and Chennai from Tamil Nadu, those states would not be significantly ahead of Bihar. These great metropolises make a great difference to their states - educating a lot of young people, providing them jobs and filling up government’s coffers. In the absence of a major city, Bihar’s government cannot provide much to its people. People get kidnapped in a large numbers and are forced to marry, pay ransom etc. As long as those are not stopped, corporations won’t enter. Bihar should really work on building a world class city that has great infrastructure and a strong security. That’s the simple formula in which the Bihar government should put most of its energy on.
EDIT: People ask why is the major city important. If you take out Mumbai, wouldn’t Maharashtra survive? They might survive but not in the same way. Mumbai is the biggest tax earner whose revenues are then distributed to the rest of the state in the form of farm subsidies, schools, roads, hospitals etc. If Mumbai vanishes for some reason, the government has to cut down a sizable portion of the spending and that would in a few generations completely destroy the socioeconomic progress. The rest of the cities - Pune, Nagpur, Nashik would then be flooded by migrants, destroying the infrastructure and social fabric of those cities. That is what happened to Bihar and UP. Their major cities and tax earners decayed under centuries of neglect during colonial era. While the English focused on the coasts from where they could trade, they didn’t build or restore any city away from the coasts. Again, you can take the example of Kerala. The state has a long coast line that is parallel to a road, a railway line and a mountain range. Nobody could have designed such a perfect transportation option that connects all the population through a single road or railway line. Water and food are in abundance. And so are tourist locations. Sea is calm without the threat of Tsunamis or major floods. No earthquakes, volcanoes or famines either. Trade winds brought traders around the world to its shores. Rulers have been quite good and the ghat sheltered them from the chaos that went out side. Despite all these advantages, in the absence of a major metropolis to provide jobs, Keralites are all over the Middle East and rest of India. For the same reason when there was a major famine in 1870s, Tamils went out in large numbers to Singapore, Sri Lanka, Palakkad and Malaysia. No happy population migrate in large numbers. Cities are important. States without great cities lag behind in economic power. Ref - Balaji Viswanathan
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Post time: 20-4-2018 00:36:52
Post time: 21-4-2018 16:47:51
Author
themaskeditor 
21-4-2018 03:50 PM