NDA contradicts itself

PATNA, March 19:

The Opposition National Democratic Alliance always criticised the Rabri Devi regime for the “backwardness” of Bihar during her eight-year stint as chief minister. It lampooned the Rashtriya Janata Dal for the creation of a state of chaos besides mocking it for not trying to ensure the state’s progress. But a 230-page Bihar Economic Survey, 2006-7, prepared by the ruling NDA government now contradicts the allegations. If the survey conducted by the finance department, headed by the deputy chief minister, Mr Sushil Kumar Modi, is to be believed, the previous regime should be complimented on making more drinking water available, curbing the infant mortality rate, increasing literacy, alleviating poverty and heightening life expectancy, the credit-deposit ratio and the production of milk. In 2001, when Mrs Rabri Devi was in power, 86.6 per cent of Bihar’s residents drank safe water. The relevant national percentage was 78. Bihar (62.8) and India (62.9) were virtually equals in life expectancy then. Bihar is said to have experienced a welcome reduction in gender disparity in literacy during the 1980s and the 1990s. In 1991, Mr Prasad was in power. The report states that the rural poverty ratio decreased in Bihar from 64.4 per cent in 1983, when a Congress government was in power, to 44.3 per cent in 1999-2000. What India managed in the same period was 3 per cent less than that. Bihar’s credit-deposit ratio is said to have been among the country’s lowest till the 1990s. But the deposit-per-branch quantum of the state’s regional rural banks increased from Rs 2.5 crore in March, 2001, to Rs 3.7 crore in March, 2005. Commendable enough, that, even though it was lower than the national growth rate in the same period. The production of milk in Bihar grew by around 92 per cent between 2001 and 2006, according to the report.