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The Rediff Special/ Shalabh Kumar

Broken Dreams: The Story of Begusarai

I said a quiet prayer of thanks when the Rabri Devi government in Bihar was dismissed in February. Bihar is where I was born and spent a substantial part of my childhood. Last summer I made a long-overdue trip back to Begusarai, my hometown.

It is a typical mofussil town of the Hindi heartland, 140 kilometres south-east of Patna. The town has grown in the post-Independence era, aided by economic activity of a substantial scale. Early on in the Nehruvian years, when Bihar had arguably its only good chief minister (Srikrishna Sinha), the Begusarai area was a showpiece of planned economic development.

Three large scale public sector undertakings drove industrial growth -- India Oil Corporation set up a refinery, the erstwhile Fertiliser Corporation of India had a downstream fertiliser factory linked to the refinery and the Bihar government set up a thermal power station. These three units were engines for substantial industrial activity, in a region that was already agriculturally quite productive. The Ganga and a couple of smaller rivers make the area quite fertile.

To complete the picture of promise, the town was also an important milestone in the road and rail connection that linked the rest of the country with the North-Eastern states, as well as being strategically located on the road connecting the port of Calcutta with landlocked Nepal.

Begusarai had all the ingredients of economic success. Yet, development in Begusarai has been limited and haphazard. The story of Begusarai is a telling commentary on the failure of Nehruvian economics and the system of governance that we have chosen.

Begusarai, as early as the 70s, represented all that could be possibly wrong with the planned economy model. It had severe power shortages much before denizens of the larger cities coined the term load-shedding. The norm was four to six hours of power cuts not only in summer, but all through the year. Water in the municipal taps, like in thousands of other small towns across the country, is a rarity and its arrival called for celebration and a mad scramble to fill up buckets and pots and pans.

The town has no drainage system worth its name -- whatever drains exist, are mostly of the open kind which overflow during the monsoons and stink up the streets at all times, apart from breeding diseases of all kinds. The town itself has grown in a largely organic fashion. The main market was on a road on which only one vehicle could pass at a time. The shops on either side of the road resisted any attempts to broaden the road. The houses were similarly constructed with little consideration for either accessibility or hygiene. Yet the industrial growth fuelled by the presence of the oil refinery had created jobs and the town expanded.

Sometime in the 70s it was made the district headquarters of a district carved out of Munger. As a result, the town got its share of government officials and buildings. Developmental efforts and planning, however, continued to be haphazard. The town, like other towns in India, has had elected municipal bodies, but these have remained largely toothless and ineffective in a political system which has made these bodies dependent on doles from a central authority and concentrated both funds and power in the hands of appointed officials.

In the 60s and 70s, the area started acquiring a reputation for crime. The closed economy of the Nehruvian model was the breeding ground for smugglers of all hues. Begusarai's strategic location between Nepal and Calcutta bred quite a few. The 'criminalisation' was aided by the growing nexus of these smugglers with politicians. The politicians needed these smugglers for their money and men, both very useful in winning elections, which were increasingly determined by the 'muscle-power' of the candidates. The smugglers benefited from the political patronage in fairly obvious ways -- a free hand, immunity from police harassment, etc.

Social life would have remained largely unaffected if the nexus had remained at this level. Unfortunately, once a 'goonda' gets police protection, or immunity from police control, his 'goondaism' proliferates. This is exactly what happened in Begusarai.

Petty, street-level goondas abounded. One of the heroes of the teenagers in my colony used to be a small-time hoodlum, a school drop-out who rode a Bullet motorcycle, flexed muscles for the Congress party in election time and was said to run an extortion racket. What inspiration!

The Begusarai that I left in my early adulthood was dirty and unhygienic, had no civic infrastructure, was mostly without electricity and water, and was unsafe. The problems were compounded, in the 80s, by the inevitable fall of the PSUs and the loss of quality jobs. As is the story with a number of PSUs across the country, the fertiliser and thermal power factories went sick. The refinery had its own problems -- its crude supply from Assam has been irregular and disrupted ever since the Assam agitation, adding to its typical PSU problems of over-staffing and low productivity.

That the Nehruvian model had failed in Begusarai was evident even in the early 80s, but that is not the end of the Begusarai story. Begusarai has rapidly deteriorated in the 80s and 90s. It is still a showpiece; a showpiece of what the faulty system of governance that we have chosen can lead us to.

I was not expecting much progress. The stories that I had heard from my parents and the newspaper reports on the Laloo/ Rabri regime, which has ruled Bihar through the 90s, had combined to keep my expectations pretty low. I was still in for a surprise -- it takes a special kind of systemic rot to lose even the progress, albeit limited, of 40 years in just 10 years time.

The drive from the railway station to my home, a distance of 15 odd kilometers on a national highway, filled my heart with despair. The highway, National Highway # 31, connects Assam and the North-Eastern states to the rest of the country and has always been a favoured truck route. The condition of the road was amazing. The road had so many potholes and was in such bad condition that the car practically crawled the entire distance. Overturned trucks on Indian highways are a familiar sight -- but I was still not prepared for the destruction I saw on this particular highway. There was a mangled truck practically every kilometer of the stretch, each a victim of this joke that passes as a National Highway.

There were many more shocks in store. The drive through the town was revealing. It was as if Begusarai has been actually going back every year for the past twenty years -- the streets are still narrow, overcrowded and dirty. In fact, the breakdown of the legal and administrative machinery means that shops and houses openly encroach on roads, further compounding the problems of narrow streets. I must add, however, that while effective administration can control such infringements, the basic problem is with the people who are totally bereft of civic sense. This is something that I have found quite common in the small towns of the cow-belt where I have traveled extensively.

Fifty years of a 'Mai-baap sarkar' have driven all sense of community responsibility out of the common Indian citizen. It is a common refrain that the streets are dirty and unhygienic because the government does not do anything -- but surely, the government doesn't force you to throw refuse on the streets, or for that matter to build that verandah right over the street ditch. Like with so many other things, Mahatma Gandhi was right in devoting so much of his time and energy in teaching Indians basic hygiene -- there is crying need for it.

The ditches in Begusarai overflow with refuse, spreading disease and stench with impunity. My eye-doctor is now the chairman of the Municipal Commission. You would never guess that if you passed by his house. The house, surrounded by a high wall and half-a-kilometer away from the Municipal HQ, is an island in a sea of muck. There are garbage heaps all over the place, open ditches with black sewage 'resting' in them and pigs having a gala time in this paradise of filth.

Public utilities are non-existent. My parents claimed that they normally have electricity at night, though the days are usually without power. I say 'claimed' because, throughout my stay, not once did we have power through the night. They were right about the days, of course. My father, like so many other Indians, has found alternatives in private enterprise. It is a complicated solution -- this is how it works. There is an inverter which can keep the fan and lights in the living room working at all times, but needs to be charged in the limited time the electricity from the SEB is available. From 10 am to 6 pm, there is a generator service shared by the houses in the area which lights (and cools!) a couple of rooms in every house. From 6 pm to morning there is a supplement service available.

The local bank branch, in a rare display of enterprise, makes its generator available to provide paid electricity to a small number of houses. (I am not sure but the generator operator might be making money on the sly here -- I couldn't establish whether the generator was owned by the bank or by the operator). All this for something as basic as electricity! What should be available to everyone, all the time, has been turned into a precious commodity.

There are a number of these instances of systemic failures. To name just one more -- water. The municipal supply has water at fixed times, often in limited quantity. My parents, having figured that alternatives are needed for every public utility, have installed a hand-pump in the courtyard.

Unlike civic hygiene, the provision of utilities needs to be set-up at a public (or governmental) level. Even if private operators run the actual business, the framework and impetus has to be provided by the government. In India, this is especially true, since utilities have been a government-only area till very recently. Some states have taken steps towards improving public utilities -- private power generation, better water distribution, etc. These steps may not fully eradicate power and water problems; they may not reach all the people or all the regions. But they at least represent an honest effort to address issues of concern to the common folks.

Failure in an honest effort can still be tolerated, but the Bihar government, under Laloo and Rabri, does not even talk about these things. The tragedy is that Laloo will continue to get elected -- a largely illiterate and unaware electorate will never know the raw deal they are being given.

That's why those words of thanks when the President's rule was imposed. I didn't really care about what motivated it -- I just hoped that a new administration will give some attention to basic development. Maybe then my 60+ parents will not have to pump water from a hand-pump to have a bath, or play-around with complicated wiring to have a decent night's sleep.

Those hopes, like development in Bihar, were stillborn.

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