Showing posts with label Bihari people. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bihari people. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 01, 2014

Bihar: Beyond Agriculture (2)

Bihar School
Bihar School (Photo credit: stevewright316)
Bihar: Beyond Agriculture

The idea would be to largely skip industrialization and focus largely on the knowledge and service sectors. Make Bihar a hub of organic farming. The goal should be to send Bihari vegetables to every kitchen table in India and then beyond. There is margin in green.

You can't have a knowledge economy without 24/7 electricity. And clean energy will come from the mighty rivers upstream in Nepal.

Start out by turning all of Patna into a free WiFi zone. If you can get to Patna from any place in Bihar within six hours, then it makes tremendous sense to turn the capital city into a free WiFi zone city. But you can't stop there. Much road building and bridge building has happened. Next in line is free WiFi, first in the capital city and then in every district headquarter.

You couple free WiFi with cheap Android smartphones. Just like the Chief Minister has been running a bicycle scheme for girl students, he should, after building the free WiFi zones, offer free smartphones to all students who finish high school if they live in free WiFi zones.

Universal primary and secondary education and universal basic health care are key. But then you have to build a string of higher education institutions across the state. You want to launch IITs and IIMs all over Bihar, or their equivalents.

All education and no job creation are no good either. Knowledge workers trained and working in Bihar could be serving companies all over the world. There is software work. There is customer service work. There is back office management work. Those jobs will be created in the private sector, but political guidance helps. You create the right environment, and you sell the vision.

Knowledge workers create more wealth than industrial workers. An emphasis on the service and knowledge sectors might be how Bihar grows from being the poorest Indian state to being a state that compares itself with the leading European economies in a few decades.

And knowledge work is not just about software. Training teachers, professors, health care workers, nurses and doctors is a big win idea. There are huge global opportunities for employment in the education and health sectors all over the world, as in Bihar.

Bihar is well-positioned to compete globally. It has to start imagining a per capital income of $5,000 a year. And the lifelong education concept means even adult Biharis are fair game.
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Sunday, March 09, 2014

Nitish In Delhi: Best Possible Outcome For Bihar



There are Biharis who don't even know Nitish is running for Prime Minister. And I don't blame them, because for the longest time Nitish kept saying he actually is not running for Prime Minister.

And then there are Biharis who like Nitish so much and are so excited about all that work he has done, all the roads and bridges he has built, all the law and order situation improvements he has brought about, all he has done in education and health, they like him and his work so much, they feel should Nitish become Prime Minister of the country then Bihar will go back to its pre-Nitish days.

That is misplaced, erroneous thinking. Think this way. Whatever Nitish has done for Bihar so far he has done by riding around on a bicycle. How much more could he do for Bihar if he could ride around on a motorbike? That is what Nitish becoming Prime Minister would be like for Bihar. It would be a good thing.

If you are happy with what Nitish has done for Bihar, but you are dissatisfied, and you want much more than what you have then the only option is to make him Prime Minister, and you do that by giving all of Bihar's 40 seats to Nitish. That is the best way to make him Prime Minister of the country.

As Prime Minister of India he can do at least five times more for Bihar than what he has been able to do so far. He might even be able to take Bihar's growth rate to 20%. This Bihari Babu will not forget Bihar in Delhi. Quite the opposite. As Prime Minister he will make Bihar the foundation for everything he does for the rest of India, and he will do much for India.

India needs Nitish if it wants to go past China.


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