As Bihar goes to vote today, I am reminded of the proverb “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”. This saying means that it is better to teach someone a skill so they can help themselves, rather than just providing them with a temporary solution.

But when it comes to electoral politics in India, that too in an impoverished state like Bihar, there is a decadal decay. Government after government has wooed the voter with schemes that can be at best called pro poverty and not pro poor. Sound politics but not sound economics.

What else would explain successive governments’ inability to bring about a qualitative change for about 130 million people in the state. The per capita income in the state is one third of the national average and what makes it worse is the state’s demography: a median age of 22 versus 30 being the national average.

For India to stay the course of economic development and work towards a sustained eight per cent growth rate, Bihar has to fire all cylinders. Irony is that whosoever forms the government, the voter is bound to be a loser. This........

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