Three years ago, when Nitish Kumar took over the reins in Bihar, he inherited a ramshackle state structure which had no history of work, coherence and dynamism, not just during the last regime but during the last century. The state could pursue its growth agenda even without an institutional memory of development, provided few other conditions were favourable. But a retarded civil society, non-existent corporate sector, largely uninformed political opinion and a limited intelligentsia could not understand the critical role of a strong state structure, the main fulcrum of an inclusive growth process.

In the last sixty years, the building of the state structure was nearly complete, in most other regions and at the Centre. The first task was value addition to the inherited colonial administration; apart from reinventing the chain of command for development administration, parallel to the general administration. It also entailedthe creation of new institutions to serve the development agenda. Such strengthening of the state and its consequent economic development would have led to a growing market structure, which could later take care of development needs, even when the state opted to retreat. In this context, one should understand that the shifting of Tata’s NANO plant from West Bengal to Gujarat indicated the generic strength of the former ‘ryotwari settled’ state structure along with its vibrant market. This is not so much due to Modi’s negotiating skills, but Gujarat’s financially powerful provincial state structure, built by successive chief ministers.

Nevertheless, all components of state-building were not uniformly achieved even in the successful provinces. Nehru became the national icon of such efforts, because he added the politics of inclusion and ideology to a techno-managerial thrust. This model was followed by several provinces, spearheaded in the south by K. Kamraj, in the north by Pratap Singh Kairon, in the west by Y.B. Chavan and in the east by Biju Patnaik. The provinces which built new state structures in the early years after Independence, are now in the forefront of development. Unfortunately, in Bihar, the agenda was never taken up. Being a ‘permanent settled’ region, where zamindars ruled the roost, the limited revenue generation stunted the state-building effort.

... contd.