Development In Bihar

The over-bridges in Bahadurpur, Agam Kuan, Chiraiyantand, and the Secretariat are in the last phase of their construction and would be open for traffic sometime next month,” said Kumar who took over the department from Nand Kishore Yadav following reshuffle in the government a few weeks ago.

“I am a little disappointed by the slow speed of work but efforts are being made to ensure these projects are completed within the expected timeframe,” the minister said adding illegal encroachment in most areas were largely responsible for the slow pace of work.

Invoking magic words like `Greater Patna Plan', `Patna Metro Development' and other such dream concepts, officials said by 2021, the face of Patna would have undergone massive facelift that would include broad streets at Ashok Rajpath, Frazer Road, Bhattacharya Road, Kadam Kuan, Boring Canal Road, Station Road, Dak Bungalow Road and other prominent streets in Patna.

In next 13 years, Patna would boast of world class education, health care, fire stations, and much better law and order situation making it one of the best cities in the east to live in, officials said on Friday.

Interestingly, since coming into power, most development projects initiated by the former Urban Development Minister Ashwini Kumar Choubey have either already failed, abandoned, or have ran into snags in the absence of sound planning or due to lack of basic understanding of urban development. Minor projects like building better underground drainage in Kankarbagh or removing trash from street corners are proving to be tasks too daunting for an amazingly inept government that so far has proven to be all talks and no substance.

According to T N Jha, director IMD Patna centre, the new facilities would help forecast weather condition five days in advance, which will be of great help to agriculture scientists and farmers. The Met office has decided to organize an Agro-Met Advisory Committee Service meeting at the ICAR auditorium in Patna on April 28. Jha said that the participants would be all district agriculture officers of the state, agriculture scientists and agricultural personnel of the Krishi Vigyan Kendra.

He said that agriculture scientists would gather the weather forecast information from the IMD, Patna Centre and inform the farmers about the forecast so that the latter could take appropriate measures for sowing or protecting their crops.

The attempt will be made by utilising hundred per cent of budgetary allocation for schemes such as Mahila Vidyalaya, Chief Minister's Kanya Vivah scheme, Naari Shakti Yojana, Kanya Suraksha Yojana and Indira Awas Yojana.

The government has also decided to earmark funds for women for scholarships and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan.

Deputy Chief Minister-cum-Finance Minister Sushil Kumar Modi told PTI that earlier it was believed public outlays were gender-neutral but it was not correct.

Though women constitute almost half of the population, they were far behind men in all aspects of human development indicators in the state, he said.

There were 3.97 crore women as against 4.32 crore men in the state, but the female literacy was just half of the male.

The state government has made a budgetary provision of Rs 2,247.80 crore for the 10 key social sector departments out of a total provision of Rs 14,957.34 crore for the present financial year, he said.

"A separate cell was being constituted in each of the ten departments to monitor the implementation of the plan for improving quality of lives of women," Modi said.

In the 10 social sector departments provision for women benefit-oriented schemes was 15 per cent of the total budget of the departments.

Mr Paswan while speaking on the occasion said that SPU would usher in prosperity in the years to come. He reiterated that development was on the top of his political agenda.

The report added that it is second SPU of which Mr Paswan had laid the foundation stone in the state in the recent past. A couple of months back a similar unit was set up in the outskirt of Bettiah in West Champaran district.

However, Bihar has been excluded from the list of proposed budget hotels. Earlier, the plan was to build budget hotels in Patna, Gaya and Rajgir to promote tourism in the state.

According to Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) director Vinod Asthana, it has been decided to commercially exploit the vacant land of railways across the country. The ambitious budget hotel plan will yield good revenue to railways. IRCTC will go ahead with the plan as approved for the first phase of work, he said.

IRCTC MD Nalin Singhale said the proposed budget hotels will be built and developed on public-private partnership basis with a view to promoting tourism and providing full comfort to tourists.

IRCTC has already selected important places where these budget hotels are to be built. These places are Delhi, Varanasi, Ajmer, Jaipur, Bhubaneswar, Allahabad, Darjeeling, Sealdah, Lucknow, Mysore, Mumbai, Ooty, Puri, Amritsar, Shimla, Ujjain, Udaipur, Chandigarh, Kanyakumari, Pune, Nagpur and Agra, he said adding Bihar did not figure in the list.

Under the proposed development, a large number of teaching and non-teaching staff who did not receive suitable remuneration for over 25 years for their services will now be given financial grant . It's estimated that, around 5,000 institutions, employs such teaching faculties who have been going without appropriate pay for more than last 25 years.

The state chief Minister Nitish Kumar, amid applause from members in both the Houses, said that the grants would be directly linked to the performance of their students in various examinations every year.

Under the plan, the target institutions would be categorise into three categories in such a way that a sum of Rs 5,500 would be allotted to degree colleges for every first division while for second divisions they would receive grants of Rs 5,000 and for third divisions, the amount would be Rs 4,500 per year per student. Hence, for girls, the state would provide an additional amount of Rs 300 for every first division and Rs 200 each for second and third divisions.

Further, the amount would be given to managing committees of these unaided institutions instead of its faculty members. The new scheme would create an additional financial burden of nearly Rs 150-200 crore per year on the state government, disclosed HRD principal secretary Anjani K Singh.

But Bihar of 2008 has a come a long way from the 'Laluland' (1990-2004), which epitomised crime, corruption, anarchy, and heart-rending poverty. It is no more the city often compared to the setting of George Orwell's Animal farm.

The State capital today looks like an earthquake-hit city covered with mounds of cement, sand, bricks and stone chips. The city's pockmarked roads, a nightmare for motorists, are now being given an unprecedented facelift. A cyber park has come up in Patna, and a major Buddha park is planned in the heart of the city. Roads are being widened and repaired and the non-existent sewage system is being put in place. City's abandoned land, where poor children squat in the wee hours and garbage dumped at night, are being fenced and turned into children's parks.

Government buildings wear a new look; town's landmarks like the Udyog Bhavan and the Patna Medical College Hospital have changed so much that it is difficult to make out them after a year's absence from the city.

There is hope in the air and even cynics have begun to admit the future looks rosy. In a State, where caste still remained the most important yardstick to decide the political preference, the divisive boundaries are breaking, down and the man who presides over this change is confident that he would change the face of the much-discredited State in the next six-seven years.

"Bihar will be a major developed State by 2015," Nitish said, sounding equally confident about his own future as Chief Minister till then.

A pilot project to see the acceptability of this new concept would soon be launched at Patna railway junction, where eight such AVMs would be installed in as many platforms this month, informed IRCTC regional manager Rajesh Rana here yesterday.

Claiming the unique concept would be materialised for the first time in India in line with those present at railway platforms of most of the developed countries, Rana said the AVMs would not only provide pre-cooked food items in bio-degradable containers, but also hot and cold beverages at competitive prices all round the year.

He said the condition of food items, previously cooked in hygienic way elsewhere, would be monitored by expert teams daily to ensure their quality.

The provision to supply the food-packers after properly warming them would also be made in the AVMs, Rana emphasised.

Claiming that the proposed conversion of all busy railway platforms as Cooking Free Zone was in line with the newly introduced catering policy of the Indian Railways, Rana said.

He also added that following a national bidding programme, a number of reputed private companies had not only evinced interest but also bagged the orders for various stations.

The plans have been sent to the Chief Minister's office for his approval, they said.

Besides the opening of a 5-star hotel in Patna, the Tourism Department plans to upgrade the Tathagat Vihar in Rajgir and Siddhartha Vihar in Bodh Gaya to 3-star status while opening a convention center and a championship golf course in BodhGaya.

Provision to open a rest house for Kanwarias at Sultanganj and Rampur has also been made in the plan submitted by the Tourism Department, it was learnt.

The state government has also sent 8 schemes to the Central government for its approval to open a Cultural Complex in Bodh Gaya, a cultural village in Nalanda, and a Food Craft Institute in Muzaffarpur, among others, at the cost of Rs. 74 crore.

The Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry has already given a go-ahead signal to all the three new IITs to start functioning right from this academic year from their temporary campuses.

Earlier, in a Planning Commission representatives' meeting, it was proposed that in order to bring IITs at par with all top universities across the globe, sufficient time should be given to develop the requisite infrastructure.

However, Director of IIT, Kanpur pointed out that most of the existing IITs had started their classes from rented premises. He pointed out that quality of the faculty is more important than classrooms for making an institute a world-class institution.

The committee had set at an outlay of Rs.760 crore each over six years in the three IITs for various routine services. In fact, the Expenditure Finance Committee (EFC) has only approved creation of the post of director and the registrar in each institute along with minimum support staff. The HRD ministry would submit a separate proposal to EFC for support staff.

As per the decision, each institute will initially have an intake capacity of 200 students, but when fully developed, the institutes will increase their students' strength subsequently.

Each IIT will have a total student strength of about 3,000 students with approximately 2,000 of them in B.Tech, 500 in M.Tech, 400 in Ph.D and 100 as post-doctoral fellows.

The plan panel suggests that each of the new IITs will be guided by one of the existing IITs to enable them to attain high standards of teaching and research.

Every IIT will have faculty strength of 262 at the end of the seventh year of operation and will also maintain the teacher-student ratio of 1:9, as in the case of other IITs.

As many as 300 students got enrolled in various courses of the extension centre in the 2007-08 academic year. Half of the seats were reserved for students from Bihar.

Flat registration: The state registration department collected a revenue of Rs 81 crore in the first ten months of the current fiscal against registration of 9,750 flats in the city.

An official press note on Monday said the achievement was significant as this amount was collected despite various relaxations given in terms of stamp duty. To clear the backlog of flat registration, the department launched a special drive last year during which mobile registration offices functioned in different localities of the city. The department also benefited by the computerisation move which expedited the registration process.

Although big firms have evinced interest in investing in the State with 115 proposals worth Rs 40,720 crore okayed by State Investment Promotion Board, there are hiccups like land acquisition and poor infrastructure in terms of power and communication, t he survey said.

Industrial sickness is another major problem as out of 26 large and medium units, 35 are closed. In the SSI sector, however, out of 72,600 units, 52,000 are functional.

According to the survey, the small scale industries are making a big contribution to Bihar's economic upsurge, apparently more than big and medium industries.

Acknowledging the great role of SSIs in propping up Bihar's economic stride, the survey said, "The share of tiny industrial units among SSIs, both registered and unregistered, is as high as 99 per cent.'' On the performance of large and medium-based indu stries vis-a-vis SSIs, it said there are only 262 large and medium units in the State with concentration only in pockets of Patna, Tirhut and Magadh divisions.

SSI units, on the other hand, have a higher visibility and "small/artisan-based industries'' are spread across the State generating 5.5 lakh man-days in the current fiscal till December, it noted.

The Kerala Government has made available 1000 acres of land for the factory. The decision follows the steady increase in the demand for metro coaches.

Announcing a decision to this effect, Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav said last year the Ministry had decided to set up a new coach factory at Rae Bareilly.

Coach supply orders have been received from Malaysia , Philippines , Vietnam , Sri Lanka , Bangladesh , Tanzania , Mayanmar , Angola , Senegal and Male during last few years.

The reconstruction unit would cost Rs. 40 crore for reconstruction of old wagons. This follows growing need for wagon maintenance and reconstruction.

He also proposed modernisation of Lilluah Workshop in West Bengal , Perambur Loco Workshop and Ajmer Loco Workshop at a cost of about Rs. 200 crore. Jamalpur Workshop would also be modernised at a cost of Rs. 82 crore to enable its development like a production unit. (ANI)

A joint delegation of these global funding agencies has come forward to provide funds for infrastructure development, particularly roads, power, tourism, irrigation and panchayati raj (local self-government).

Official sources said Wednesday that the delegation promised to provide funds for the state's development in a meeting with the state's Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

The delegation submitted a report on the joint approach of the international development partners' group towards Bihar.

After the meeting Tuesday, an upbeat Nitish Kumar said he was happy that Bihar was the first state where the new concept was being introduced to give financial aid in infrastructure development and other sectors.

The state government had approached the World Bank for assistance in Bihar Rural Livelihood Project. It had also sought assistance from ADB for infrastructure development, particularly roads and power.

The government had approached DFID for assistance in strengthening panchayati raj institutions under the Sarkar Apke Dwar (government at your doorstep) programme.

The centre's nod has relieved the Bihar government, which is facing violent protests due to the worst power crisis the state has ever seen.

Three people were killed and at least two dozen injured in police firing in Kahalgaon town in Bhagalpur district Jan 18 when people were protesting against electricity outages.

According to sources in Bihar State Hydro Power Corporations (BHPC), the Ministry of Environment and Forests has found no environmental hazard with the setting up of the Dagmara hydropower project and has given its clearance.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) had already agreed to provide Rs.4 billion for the project.

A senior BHPC official told IANS that work on the project would begin this year and would be completed in the next three years if everything went according to plan.

After the completion of the project, overall power situation in the state's Kosi region is expected to improve considerably.

Last September, an agreement was signed between the BHPC and the central government's Water and Power Consultancy Services Ltd. (Wapcos) for preparation of a detailed project report.

The project is estimated to cost Rs.6 billion.

This decision was taken at a meeting between Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar here.

It was also agreed that on the basis of mid-year performance and absorptive capacities, an additional outlay of Rs.500 crore, in the special package of assistance based on performance, can be included in the Annual Plan for the year 2008-09, taking this to an effective plan size of Rs.13,500 crore.

Mr. Ahluwalia complimented the Bihar Government on the major initiatives taken towards administrative reforms, decentralisation and simplification of procedures, delegation of powers and also focused attention towards implementation of flagship programmes launched by the Central Government, which has lead to acceleration in plan expenditure.

Efforts appreciated
Appreciating efforts being made for improving performance in the sectors of education, health and horticulture, Mr. Ahluwalia said the Commission was concerned about the problem being faced by the States in executing centrally-sponsored schemes and was looking forward to suggestions aimed at improving implementation by making guidelines flexible wherever necessary.

The chief minister along with senior officials from the state will meet Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia Wednesday to finalise the annual outlay.

Last year, the state's annual outlay was of Rs.86.70 billion ($2.2 billion).

According to sources in the Planning Commission, the state government wants to spend Rs.42.7 billion ($1.1 billion) on social services sector comprising education, health, water supply, housing, and urban development.

'Rs.9.3 billion ($236 million) would be spent on rural development, while the state government proposes to spend Rs.4.4 billion ($112 million) on agriculture and allied services,' sources said.

The irrigation and flood control, the annual natural disaster, may get Rs.18 billion ($458 million) against Rs.13.4 billion ($341 million) allocated last year. The transport department might get Rs.29 billion ($738 million).

The major areas in the agriculture sector that the state has identified to take care of include seed production, its multiplication and livestock sector.

'The state government has proposed Rs.331 million ($8 million) for forestry and wildlife for the coming fiscal, out of which Rs.130 million ($3.3 million) would be spent on rehabilitating the degraded forests,' sources added.

"Investors from all across the nation have submitted their proposals to the tune of Rs. 40,000 crore. Sugar mills that had been declared dead years ago are being revived and institutes like Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) are making their entrances in the state," Gavai said adding a B-School named after Chandragupta Maurya on the pattern of Indian Institute of Management (IIM) was also on the drawing board in Bihar.

Recounting the major events of 2007, particularly the flood, the Governor said even the nature was testing the endurance power of Bihar.

"More than 5 lakh homes were washed away in the flood. Food-grains worth over crores of rupees were destroyed pushing Bihar several steps backward while sidetracking it from various schemes that were meant to put the state on the path of development. These adversities, however, failed to dampen the spirit of Bihar where economic prosperity is finally beginning to appear attainable," the Governor said.

Gavai also praised the NDA government in Bihar for checking crime rate in the state.

"There is no doubt crime has gone down in Bihar but we are still far from claiming a success. The state government is taking on the criminals and corrupt officers head on thus creating an atmosphere that is conducive to business and education," he said.

During the occasion, the Governor also honored 11 soldiers from Bihar for their brave and courageous acts to defend the country.

Meanwhile, the float presented by the Information and Public Relations Department won the first place prize on look and theme with actors reenacting the Sepoy Mutiny of the 1857.

The second and third place was awarded to the state Tourism Department and COMFED respectively.

Railway projects worth over Rs 20,000 crore, including the Diesel Loco Factory in Chapra, Electric Loco Factory in Madhepura and a Rail Coach Factory in Rae Bareli, were so far on hold due to prolonged delay in land acquisition by railways. Prasad, however, got the cabinet nod for promulgating an ordinance to amend the Railways Act, 1989, for expeditious land acquisition for "special railway projects".

Even work on the prestigious Dedicated Freight Corridor (DFC) has not begun due to problems of land acquisition, a senior railway official said. Prasad, he said, managed to convince his cabinet colleagues that the proposed ordinance would in no way harm the interests of land owners. The ordinance will provide for adherence to all the provisions in the policy on rehabilitation and resettlement of displaced persons, Prasad is reported to have told his colleagues.