An excerpt from ‘Broken Promises: Caste, Crime and Politics in Bihar’, by Mrityunjay Sharma. https://scroll.in/article/1065424/how-did-bihar-once-the-cradle-of-civilisation-devolve-into-a-state-of-crime-poverty-and-misrule
Bihar’s fall from a position of prosperity can be attributed to multiple factors spread over the last two centuries. However, the three most important factors for Bihar’s economic decline in the period of modern history have been listed by Arnab Mukherji and Anjan Mukherji in a 2012 paper titled “Bihar: What Went Wrong? And What Changed?”
The most recent and the larger reason for Bihar’s fall from grace is what this book is about. The period from 1990 to 2005, often dubbed as “Jungle Raj”, was a controversial period in which the government de-emphasised the state’s urgent development issues in order to pursue the ostensibly higher goal of social empowerment. Recruitments to public posts and development expenditures were highly curtailed in the belief that they would primarily benefit the upper castes. During these fifteen years, the state experienced an average annual growth rate of less than 1 per cent, while real per capita income nearly stagnated.
26/03/2024