The recent disclosure in Patna by the chairman of the Tata Sons Ltd, Ratan Tata, that he was visiting Bihar's capital for the first time in 30 years came as a rude surprise. Not only that, three decades back he was here not on any business trip but to appear in a case in the Patna High Court. This is not an isolated instance. It rather goes to suggest as to how much Bihar, as such even in the past, figured in the scheme of things of big industrial houses. The overall scenario in the state was then not as bad as today. The irony is that they overlooked or ignored Bihar notwithstanding the fact that they have heavy investments in this state. The captains of industry seldom even bothered to make a stopover to the capital city of the state which, to much extent, helped them change their fortune.

Till November 15, 2000 Jharkhand, where the Tatas have almost all the core industries, was a part of Bihar. Similarly Birlas, Dalmias, Ashok Jains etc all have big investments in this state yet the top bosses of these industries seldom visited its capital. Some of the relatively small corporate bosses did attend the conference called by the then chief minister, Lalu Prasad Yadav, in May 1995 to invest in the state. So far investment is concerned the state government achieved little success then.

If the bigwigs of Tatas, Mahindra and Mahindra etc visited Bihar's capital recently they have done so not on their own. The present chief minister, Nitish Kumar, invited them to give an industrial boost to the state, which now is without the mineral rich part, now known as Jharkhand. True, the industrialists invest in the state where they expect to get good result. But they are supposed to take up social, educational and other philanthropic works too. Take the case of Tatas, the industry known for better human face. They have no doubt taken up some works, but most of them remained confined to Jamshedpur itself, the town where its flagship company is situated. They have done some work in the field of education and health but they were limited to what is called the present day Jharkhand. Outside Jharkhand they can boast of Tata Ward in the Patna Medical College Hospital, which came up in 1990s. The TISCO, it needs to be reminded here, started full-fledged production by 1912.

Similarly the other industrial houses contributed too meagre in this direction in this state. And even if they have done something it is limited to the area which now forms Jharkhand. In contrast we have Tata Institue of Fundamental Research and Tata Institute of Social Sciences, two premier centres of research in science and social science situated in Mumbai. Besides, there is a cancer hospital. The Indian Institute of Science (IISc), the oldest and most reputed such centre, is still known as Tata Institute in Bangalore. When these centres of learning came up there was no big industry like TISCO or TELCO either in Mumbai or Bangalore.

Birlas had an engineering college in Ranchi and have after repeated persuasion opened one such institution in Patna only recently. This phenomenon is not only restricted to Bihar but to other minerally rich but actually backward states. They all have their head offices in the metros. Unfortunately this is the treatment meted out to these states even by the Public Sector Undertakings.

I view it slightly differently: namely, complete bypassing of the interest of Bihar due to the distant decision making. Thus, even the genuine needs of the state, both Jharkhand and Bihar, were ignored.

I am told, even in the days of unified Bihar, West Bengal collected more sales tax from the sales of TISCO and TELCO than Bihar since the sales were done from Calcutta as interstate sale giving CST where state of origin was given half of the CST collected. Funny as it may sound, Bihar Commercial Taxes Deptt had to open a huge set up in Calcutta to salvage some of the revenue.

The scenario is no different in the PSUs. SAIL had its HQ at Delhi and Coal India at Calcutta. Significantly, their predecessors, Hindustan Steel and NCDC, had their HQ at Ranchi.

Banks like 'Bank of Behar' headquartered at Antaghat, Patna, were merged with State Bank of India. The HQ shifted to Mumbai. While natural advantage of Bihar was neutralised through Freight Equalisation, it was not deemed fit to shift even one of the fourteen neo nationalised bank HQ to Bihar. The result is that the credit deposit ratio is an abysmal sub 30%. The poorest state of India is a net exporter of capital.

Thakur Vikas Sinha

tvsinha@gmail.com