Bihar is poor, which we all know. In fact our knowledge is so pervasive, detailed and voluminous that we appear to be: swollen headed, know-it-all, and arrogant. But, we don’t seem to know any specific rule of transformation, which could use this information and transform Bihar into a rich and vibrant state. Meanwhile there is a possibility that such detailed knowledge could fall prey to either "analysis paralysis" and/or "information overload".

The Perspectives

Bihar is the name of that ancient land, which saw immense prosperity at the time when the other civilisations were just being conceived. Ajatshatru was so adept in logistics that he could successfully deploy an army of more than 75,000 from one end of the empire to another, which is more than the current breadth of India.

Bihar is the name of that land, which, along with Bengal and Orissa, was handed over to the East India Company, who got its first ever rights in India, to collect rent on behalf of the Moguls.

Bihar is the name of the land, which has arbitrarily drawn boundaries.

It is interesting to note that the people of Bihar never had the right to land ownership (this is true for all of India) till the British decided to implement the concept half heartedly. The land always belonged to the ruler. Cornwallis brought the term ‘settlement’ into play in 1789, which defined a Zamindar.

In order to manage these far flung land, the Moguls, and later the British, appointed agents, who executed the commands of their respective empires and collected the rent. Thus the practice of zamindari was born.

The so-called ruling class of Bihar was always subservient to these agents. In reality, the real ruling class along with any form of local leadership was either wiped out or persistently persecuted.

But the real blow came in circa 1857, when the British went after the Biharees, since the mutineers were mostly they. The British Indian Army, at that time, was mainly recruited from Bihar. The Bengal Lancers should have been called Bihar Lancers. But then, Bihar as such was not an entity then, and the terms ‘Bengal’ and ‘Bihar’ were almost synonymous.

The British crushed the mutiny with the help of the Sikhs and the Gorkhas and then chased the vanquished Biharees right through their villages and shot them publicly by tying them to the muzzles of the cannons. Still not satisfied, they rampaged the land with their scorched earth policy. From which, Bihar has yet to recover. And then to add insult to injury they vilified the name ‘Bihar’ itself. From then on, in their vernacular, a Bihari meant a rogue.

And the vilification continues.

There is abundance of resources in Bihar, in spite of it being now bifurcated. It has fertile land, people with good physique and aggressive attitude, plenty of water resources, and weather that does not necessarily kill. It is a God’s gift. There are no questions on abundance of resources.

However, a society is an eco system, which has numerous hidden interconnections and interdependence, which must be balanced. Nature has the tendency to randomly move towards disorder but conditionally resurrects an orderly formation always with a newfound balance. Bihar is in search of that balance. A society can bring about the balance by leveraging on the collective intelligence. Meanwhile, Nature, in the presence of inaction, relentlessly imposes an order and balance, by turning the animate to inanimate. Extinction is not an unnatural phenomenon.

Culture is the institutionalised behaviour of a society. Biharees, culturally, do not seem to have the drive to achieve anything. There is an air of complacency. Obviously there seems to be neither motivation nor any incentive to strive towards an economic goal.

For hundreds of years, it has been so that any surplus produced was forcibly snatched away. Thus the response behaviour to seek the minimum survival level became part of the psyche and subsequently got embedded in the system. Further, Biharees adapted the defence technique of a hedgehog. The all too obvious symptoms are: parochialism, hostility towards outsiders and widespread ritualism.

This society is also very tolerant of its environment. Tolerance is an excellent virtue but in economic sense it leads to the famous ‘boiling frog’ syndrome. A society learns to tolerate worsening environment till Nature strikes back with either severe violence or disease. It sounds Malthusian but Malthus did not account for the band-aid treatments like the vaccination and antibiotics as well as an organised external army or Police force. In order to expound the above point let us look at the boiling frog experiment, which goes like this:

In this ‘boiling frog’ experiment, if you changed the temperature of the water suddenly and quickly the frog would jump out of the water, provided it is not already immobilised. But if the effect of the slow boil has already taken its toll, all you would do, by increasing the temperature, is hasten its death.

In case of Bihar, it is obvious that it does not want to, or rather can’t, jump out of the boiling water. The immobility has set in. Such is the enigma of ‘maladaptation to gradually building threats to survival’.

Zilch. But then it couldn’t have been any other way. The society has been conditioned such that it tends to pull down the local leadership. This conditioning was done systematically, over hundreds of years. The phenomenon is explained vividly by the following ‘monkey’ experiment:

In such a conditioned environment, to leap beyond the pack, one has to know how to beat the system and then keep himself immune to the society and its needs. He has to behave like an agent of the real or virtual empire, with the sole purpose of exploitation. This is what the society will accept.

Is it a wonder that all the current so called leaders behave in the same fashion?

What we describe as corruption is actually the symptoms of a failing system. The system is leaking and the smart leach-like individuals just latch on to the right spots and suck away as much as they can. You remove one from the gaping wound and immediately another will take his place.

The individuals are not corrupt. It is the system, which has broken down.

Population is a problem, whether it is over population or under-population. Mankind has to live with it.

The higher population density and birth rates are not an indication of ignorance or stupidity of Biharees. It is the natural reaction against the risk to survival. There are two factors contributing towards this behaviour:

1. Early mortality:

   Perceived or real. In either case Nature adopts the strategy of proliferation to mitigate the risk. By forcing the issue, like Sanjay Gandhi, one ends up juxta positioned against Nature itself. The cause of over population is poverty not the other way round. Propagation is the Nature’s response to shortened life span and early mortality. It seeks to corroborate immortality by reducing the risk of extinction. No western country has ever practiced a ‘government imposed’ family planning program. It was the economy, which proved to be the best contraceptive.

2. Earning ability: in the subsistence economy of Bihar, when an 8 year old becomes an earning member, his relative contribution to the family’s earning is substantial. One need not be an economist to calculate that more number of children creates more earning potential. This is nothing new. The now industrialised countries had to go through the same syndrome. They came out of it by increasing the threshold of the base economic earnings. In a western country a child works and earns, but just for his pocket money.

There is no doubt; there are a vast number of mouths to be fed in Bihar. But, the solution is not to forcibly reduce these numbers. Such a strategy will require a pogrom conducted by someone like Hitler.

Family planning has not worked and will not work till an economic solution is found. A human being is geared to survive and Nature always works on the principles of lowering the probability of the occurrence of the threat. There are plenty of examples in the animal kingdom where species belonging to a lower stratum of the food chain survive by the strategy of proliferation.

The numbers will grow in proportion to the increase in poverty. It has been proven round the world that improved economy reduces the rate of population growth.

The entire administrative system of Bihar has been organised to take in the ‘loot’. Each and every process had been geared to fill the coffers of the empire. It was the Moguls, namely Akbar, who invented this machinery and the British honed it to perfection. There was no concept of giving back to the producers. That is why the producers had no incentive to improve production. The more one produced the more the emperor would confiscate. Why would an average Bihari producer be inventive or creative?

Unfortunately the system has not changed, even after independence. But ironically, the system does not know where to spew off the loot, after it is collected. The British have gone and the Moguls went long ago but the machinery is still working.

Should one be surprised if the bureaucracy and the politicians end up cornering these fruits of exploitation?

Mental models are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how one understands the world and how he takes actions. Very often, we are not consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they have on our behaviours. Difficult it may be, but it is important to understand the cause and effect of these models.

The term ‘Bihar’ and ‘Bihari’ are now synonymous to boorishness and everything that is not right. Unfortunately this follows the law of ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. The opinion of the nation is influencing the behaviour of a Bihari. This influence is so strong that either one starts mimicking the expected behaviour or distances himself from being a Bihari.

This mental model is so pervasive that an average Bihari feels apologetic in acknowledging the fact that he or she is a Bihari. This is a symptom of erosion of self-confidence and injection of self-pity, which creates an infertile environment for a local leadership to blossom.

The British had a reason and purpose for propagating and maintaining such a mental model, whereas independent India does not, but it continues to do what they did.

Normally it starts with a vision. Queen Elizabeth I had the vision to rule the waves. The objective was to accumulate wealth. The strategy adopted was "Conquest and Confiscation". Thus a structure was put in place. Since, structure influences behaviour, the British society took up the mantle of imperialism.

Without going too deeply into the history, we can safely say that later, a structure was invented for the directly ruled areas in India, like Bihar. And soon enough Biharees started behaving in an expected manner. However, this structure also generated implicit goals, over a period, which may not have been aligned with the original objectives. That is where a vicious circle starts. The system resists any change, which could bring in perceived imbalance. But the funny thing is that once a significant time has passed nobody knows, what these objectives were.

At the moment, we don’t know what are the implicit goals of the structure, which is active in Bihar. But any attempt to change will meet with stiff resistance. Here again, it is not the people who directly control it. They don’t even know that they are putting up that resistance. The push back is an automatic reaction of the system.

Somebody will have to somehow identify this structure and reverse engineer the objectives, which is not an easy task. Here he’ll be looking for the ‘systemic structure’, which is concerned with the key interrelationships that influence behaviour over time. These are not interrelationships between people, but among key variables, such as population, natural resources, and food production.

The idea is to identify the interrelationships rather than just the linear cause-effect chains and plot the processes of change instead of snapshots.

Further, we must recognise the fact that when placed in the same system, people, however different, tend to produce similar results. I can bet that anyone who is living in Bihar will behave very much like a Bihari, irrespective of his origins.

Hence, we’ll have to look beyond personalities and events and expose the underlying structures, which shape individual actions and create the conditions where types of events become likely.

Without trying to establish a linear cause-effect chain let us try to list the cause, in light of the above scenario:

1. Bihar as a whole has lost its balance due to the hundreds of years of foreign occupation, which rewove the entire economic fabric to suit its strategy of ‘conquest and confiscate’.
2. There is no genuine local leadership with vision because the potential leaders are not allowed to survive. The society is conditioned to pull back the ‘monkey’.
3. There is no perceived or real motivation to improve productivity. The social psyche, based on the experience of perpetual exploitation, sees higher productivity as a threat. A surplus attracts the attention of the ruthless exploiter.
4. The society does not have any political power to influence its destiny.

The above causes could possibly have led to the following effects:

1. People are cagey and try to hold on to whatever they have.
2. There is rampant insecurity, which abhors risk taking.
3. No new technology or processes are invented or adopted.
4. The exploitation continues by proxy.
5. Value addition and creation of wealth is avoided.

The current situation in Bihar can be visually described by plotting a downward sloping spiral. The gradient can be assigned as per an analyst’s level of optimism. The most optimists would put it as 5 degrees and the least, possibly at 30 degrees. In either case the lifetime of the society will be a question of very few decades.

However, with radical thinking the spiral can be turned upwards. The recent Panchayat elections might provide the platform for just that.

The system can be made to re-invent itself, if the Panchayats adopt some of the following strategies:

1. Make the land production-centric rather than ownership-centric
2. Establish a planning process with expert input
3. Get a lock-in with the development as well as commercial funding processes
4. Emphasise on value addition by implementing food processing and technologies
5. Become part of a larger supply chain
6. Introduce local taxation, fund management and accounting
7. Re-organise and restructure the basic services

There is tremendous potential in Bihar, but it comes with challenges. However, with the talk of "Marshall Plan" like push by the rich nations, most of the challenges can be met. It is just a matter of mobilising the right intellect.