Bihar was adjudged to be the worst performer in the NITI Aayog’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) index 2020-21. The NITI Aayog’s SDG index evaluates the progress of states and Union Territories on various parameters including health, education, gender, economic growth, institutions, climate change and environment.
In the latest index, released on June 3, Kerala retained the top rank with a score of 75, while Bihar was adjudged to be the worst performing state with a score of 52.
Among the Union Territories Chandigarh with 79 topped the list and Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu occupied the bottom place with the score of 62. India’s score was 66.
While Rashtriya Janata Dal chief Lalu Prasad and his son Tejashwi Prasad Yadav were quick to target chief minister Nitish Kumar as Bihar has occupied this position for the third consecutive year the truth is that corona virus has further exposed the so-called development made by the NDA government in the last about 16 years.
The So-Called Turn-around
Though in the initial years the media praised to sky the Nitish Kumar government for ‘turn-around’ on health, education, infrastructure etc. sectors, the truth is something else.
For example, in the first four years of the Nitish Kumar government, hundreds of patients had died due to the frequent strikes by doctors as well as junior doctors in the Patna Medical College and Hospital and five other medical college and hospitals in Bihar. In June 2008, Nitish became so upset that he even ordered the arrest of six leaders of junior doctors and refused to meet their delegation. He was once reportedly so angry that he even warned to close down the PMCH.
This prompted former Union health minister Dr C P Thakur, to step in and a compromise was reached. The state government withdrew cases against the leaders of junior doctors’ union.
On another occasion other prominent doctors had to intervene and bring about truce between the state government and agitating junior doctors.
Then in January 2012 the then health minister under the same Nitish government, Ashwini Choubey, who is now the Union minister of state for health, warned the doctors that their hands would be chopped off if they go on strike.
The minister’s absurd utterances notwithstanding, the doctors strike continue to be a special feature of the present government.
Media’s Nefarious Role
Those were the years when media-houses were giving one award after another to Nitish Kumar for being the best chief minister of India.
After all he was credited for bringing about the so-called revolutionary changes in health, education and infrastructure sectors.
The truth was something else for which the people of the state are paying a heavy price now. The media has actually done the greatest dis-service to the people of Bihar by not calling a spade a spade.
Infrastructure sector
This is not to ignore the fact that Bihar did a good job on infrastructure sector in the period between 2005 and 2010. But for this the credit goes to the Manmohan Singh government too. The Pradhan Mantri Grameen Sadak Yojana would never have been such a success without the work done by the then Union rural development minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, a leading light of the Rashtriya Janata Dal.
Similarly, the Golden Quadrilateral, East-West Corridor and National Highways were the projects of the Union government. Yet the media gave all the credits to Nitish and not to Manmohan Singh government.
True roads were built by the Nitish Kumar government too, but later the people started realising what the hell had been created in the name of development. A brief pre-monsoon shower in May this year left a large part of posh localities of Patna waterlogged for days. Patnaites do not want to be haunted by the 2019 fortnight long waterlogging in which even the then deputy CM Sushil Kumar Modi had to be rescued. Needless to say, it was not a flood but just heavy rain in the last week of September.
Third Consecutive Year Of Failure
This is the third consecutive summer in which the entire health system of Bihar got exposed. Around this very time in 2019, hundreds of children perished in a matter of a couple of days in Muzaffarpur and half a dozen adjoining districts to what in local parlance was called “champi bukhar” or acute encephalitis syndrome. The state government blamed litchi, a fruit grown in abundance in this very region, for the epidemic.
It is other thing that two years later, while speaking in “Mann Ki Baat” on May 30 last, Prime Minister Narendra Modi chose to mention about the importance of litchi.
Nitish Flayed Only for Migrant Crisis in 2020
A year later corona virus exposed how seriously ill the entire health system of Bihar is. Luckily for chief minister Nitish Kumar his government escaped the criticism it deserved on this front. Instead, most of the critics remained busy lambasting Prime Minister Narendra Modi for imposing sudden lockdown on March 24 night.
Nitish was then largely flayed for his utter failure in tackling the migrant crisis and not for the health system which was in a shambles.
The chief minister, according to various media reports, did not come out of his house for about 100 days last year virtually leaving all the functioning at the hands of bureaucrats. Jokes started doing the rounds that the then director general of police Gupteshwar Pandey is the de facto chief minister of Bihar.
Second Wave of COVID-19
But the second wave of corona virus, in which thousands of people of Bihar have died in the last two months, has shown that the health system is not only sick, but is actually on death-bed. In the name of health system there exist only private hospitals and clinics.
What is somewhat surprising is that over 100 doctors—as per the data of the Indian Medical Association—died in just two months. The actual number may be higher as a huge number of doctors could not be counted as they are not members of the IMA.
At the height of Corona Virus surge in April this year, Bihar’s health minister Mangal Pandey was virtually camping in West Bengal where Assembly election was going on.
Instead of the health system what has grown strong in Bihar in the last 16 years is the politician-bureaucrat-contractor nexus.
NRHM Story
It is true that the number of patients turning up at the primary health centres in rural Bihar increased during the initial years of Nitish’s rule. Yet those were the years when multi-million Uterus Scam was going on in Bihar, and the media turned a blind eye to it. In contrast a journalist of BBC World Service came all the way from England to make a documentary on it.
Here a big question arises. How the chief minister of the state who is unable to properly run the Patna Medical College and Hospital, which is not even seven kilometres from his residence, managed to attract patients in the primary health centres in rural Bihar?
What the totally biased media failed to highlight is that these primary health centres had been attracting some patients just because of the then Manmohan Singh government’s National Rural Health Mission and not at all due to Nitish Kumar government.
What to speak of the salary to contractual doctors and other health workers, even the medicine and money for buying diesel for generators used to come from the centrally-funded National Rural Health Mission.
Series of Scams
Those were the initial years of Shelter Homes Scam, in which about three dozen underaged girls were alleged to be sexually exploited and killed in Muzaffarpur and other places. The main accused was a man considered too close to Nitish Kumar. It is other thing that it took 10 years for the scam to come out and that too by social auditing by Tata Institute of Social Sciences and not by the media.
Bicycle Yojana
The end result of the Bicycle Yojana for girls was the infamous Toppers’ Scam of 2016 in which the girl and boy topping Plus-II exam were unable to answer even the basic questions to the media persons. The fault was not just of teenaged students but of the then chairman of the Bihar School Examination Board, Lalkeshwar Singh and his wife, considered too close to Nitish.
Liquor Scam, Staff Selection Commission Examination Scam, the Rice-Mills Scam, the alleged Rs 2,500 crore Srijan Scam, School Enrolment Scam etc. all have their roots in the first tenure of the Nitish Kumar rule, that is between 2005 and 2010 when all these same lot of journalists were busy declaring him as the best chief minister India had ever produced.
So, if Bihar continues to be at the bottom and Kerala–where either the Left Democratic Front or the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance has always been in power–stood first, then one should not be surprised.
In the last about 16 years Bihar has perhaps topped in the number of mega scams in India.
Soroor Ahmed is a senior journalist based in Patna. Views are personal.
