Special Plenary Session 1: Bihar Development
The first plenary session had deputy chairman of the Planning commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the governor of the Reserve Bank of India D Subbarao, Professor of the London School of Economics Prof Lord Nicholas Stern and JD (U) MP N K Singh, analyzing various scenarios for the state’s growth and development.
While N K Singh pleaded for special category status for Bihar, Ahluwalia and Subbarao batted for encouragement of other sectors like industries instead of concentrating on agriculture. The discussions largely centered on inflation, tax system, subsidy and central schemes.
Nicholas Stern hammered for environmental aspects, health and education for all round development of the Bihar. Speakers gave thrust on controlling inflation and pleaded for increasing credit-deposit ratio in Bihar, and the state government must strengthen cooperative system.
Ahluwalia pointed out that Bihar has developed in the last five to six years. Though the state GDP has jumped satisfactorily, he lamented poor living condition of Biharis and dipping per capita income.
Bihar got a pat from him for achieving good growth rate over the past five-six years with proper utilisation of central funds.
B K Chaturvedi Committee is working on streamlining the central schemes and Ahluwalia expressed hope that there would be fewer central schemes in the 12th Five Year Plan.
Subbarao admitted that credit-deposit (CD) ratio, which is 34-35% in Bihar, was terribly low. Explaining the reasons behind the prevalence of low CD ratio in the state, Rao said: “Remittances are huge from migrant people. Besides, the bank officials say there is no demand for credit in the state.”
Renowned British economist Nicolas Stern said climate change and poverty posed two major challenges before the world. “Global warming, climate change and poverty have emerged as two critical and defining problems of the world and its economy, and neither of the problems should be taken lightly,” he said. The vagaries of climate change were affecting the entire world and would lead to relocation of billions of people, which would cause conflict over food and water, Stern said. Observing that all countries have been collectively negligent in managing global warming and climate change, he said that none of us can postpone plans to deal with it.
