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If Bihar was a country, it would be one of the largest countries in the world.
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It would also be one of the poorest countries in the world.
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If this fact surprises you, even though you live in India, is despite the fact that most
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of us living outside Bihar, especially in the big cities, think of Bihar as another
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Many Indians live in conditions akin to sub-Saharan Africa.
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This is unseen by the rest of us, especially if we live in an elite prosperous bubble in
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A large mass of humanity extending from the child outside our car at the traffic signal
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to the poorest of the poor in our villages remain unseen to us.
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And I don't just want to do a bleeding heart lament here.
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If India is still poor after so many decades of independence is because of bad policies
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We need to talk about them more.
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We need to understand the world the way it is and grapple with the problem in concrete
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What mistakes did we make?
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What can we do about it?
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What can we learn from Bihar?
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What can we do to fix Bihar?
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Welcome to the Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to the Seen and the Unseen.
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My guests today are Mohit Satyanand and Kumar Anand, two important thinkers and dear friends
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of mine who've both featured on this show in the past.
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Last December, Mohit and Kumar did a road trip through Bihar to try and understand the
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Kumar is from Bihar and Mohit loves road trips and thinking deeply about the world.
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They came back with many insights and I've finally gotten them to sit with me and talk
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about what they saw and what they learned.
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I'm sure you'll enjoy this conversation and I also recommend you follow Mohit's
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I will link them both from the show notes.
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But before we begin, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Hey, the music started and this sounds like a commercial, but it isn't.
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It's a plea from me to check out my latest labor of love, a YouTube show I am co-hosting
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with my good friend, the brilliant Ajay Shah.
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We've called it, Everything is Everything.
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Every week, we'll speak for about an hour on things we care about, from the profound
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to the profane, from the exalted to the everyday.
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We range widely across subjects and we bring multiple frames with which we try to understand
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Please join us on our journey and please support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel
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at youtube.com slash Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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The show is called Everything is Everything.
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Please do check it out.
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Mohit and Kumar, welcome to Economic Learnings of India for Make Benefit Glorious Nation
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of Bihar, the seen and the unseen.
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Yeah, so, you know, sometime in the middle of last year, I think I was recording in Delhi
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in August and I remember I met you then, Mohit, when I was doing 12 episodes in 12 days and
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you kindly extended me an invite.
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You said in December, you know, we are going on a road trip to Bihar by which you meant
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And would you like to join us, Amit?
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And I unfortunately had to say no because I had plans to do various things and I thought
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I ended up doing none of them.
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But regardless, make believe glorious busyness of Amit.
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But I'm intrigued to learn that what brought about that desire in you guys?
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You know, let's do a road trip to Bihar.
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What was the push behind it?
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So I think I instigated it.
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So perhaps it's better that I explain.
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So it came in a roundabout way.
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It actually came about as a result of a trip to Punjab, which I took.
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And I went to see the Partition Museum, a deep interest because my family is the product
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But one of the learnings from that when I went back to data after that trip was as to
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how Punjab had surrendered its primacy a long time ago.
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And it was took a while coming as the richest large state in the country and was now edging
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towards the middle, which was quite a shock to me because being of Punjab, there was this
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tendency to glorify Punjab.
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But to the point of the trip to Bihar, I then was studying the state GDP tables.
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And I think it's common knowledge that Bihar is the poorest state in the country in terms
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But what struck me was the magnitude of its relative deprivation.
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So to put the numbers out there, the average GDP of India is about $2,300, $2,400 per capita.
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In nominal terms, there's that whole PPP thing.
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But let's stay with the actual numbers.
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So the average Bihari is three and a half times as poor as the average Indian who is
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But to look at it in terms of if you were to look at the glorious nation of Bihar, as
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you called it, I think it's quite apt to call it a nation.
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Because if it was a nation, it would be the 11th largest nation in the world.
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And if it was a nation in terms of per capita income, it would be the 11th poorest nation
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Which not only did I find gobsmacking, but when I spoke to other people who study economics,
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all of them went, wow, just as you did.
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I said, here we are, we're sitting in this nation, a lot of us study economics.
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Everybody has said, wow.
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Not one person has said, yeah, yeah, you know, we knew it.
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Another fact that intrigued me was that if you look at the scatter from the richest to
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the poorest, the richest large state in India, relatively large, excluding the cities, is
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Goa, which has a per capita GDP of 7,200.
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That's a gap of 11 is to one.
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It's almost like we inhabit different planets.
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And then the amusing thought that struck me was people like to go to prosperous nations.
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People like to go to the US and to Europe for a holiday.
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They don't like to go to poor countries.
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And those who can't afford to go to Europe, but want to go abroad, go to Thailand.
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And Thailand and Goa have exactly the same per capita income.
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So this was, you know, but the point that really intrigued me was that how is it that
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in one nation you can have this kind of spread?
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What is so special about Bihar that it should be so poor?
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It would actually be the poorest large nation in the world without compare.
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No other nation would come as close.
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And if you look at other nations in Asia, the only ones which are poorer are Yemen,
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Syria and Afghanistan, all of which are war-torn.
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So what is this war in Bihar that has kept it so poor?
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It's relatively peaceful.
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It has no more crime or homicide than other states.
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Gangs of Wasif are not withstanding.
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And I turned to Kumar and he said, boss, I really don't know.
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And I said, there's a limit to what statistics and reading can teach you.
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And there's not very much been written on Bihar.
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So let's take a road trip.
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And I'm not a research economist.
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I'm not about to produce a paper on it.
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But I'm one of those guys who likes to have their feet on their ground and pick up whatever learning I can or whatever it's worth.
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So that's the long answer to the genesis of this trip.
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So for Mohit, as he just explained, it's really an intellectual journey.
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There's a puzzle at the heart of it.
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And he wanted to solve the puzzle.
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But I'm guessing that for you, since you are from Bihar, it's a visceral journey as well.
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It's an emotional journey as well.
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So tell me a little bit about the Bihar that you grew up in.
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And when we grow up, everything is normalized.
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So you assumed that Bihar is poor and Delhi is fine, Bombay is fine.
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And you don't really think so much about the why's or look too deep.
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So what has that process been like you for thinking about Bihar?
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So like Mohit was saying, I never looked at Bihar except for one time in 2011, closely.
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This is when I was working for a market research company in Hong Kong.
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And they were for some reason were OK with me doing a paper on a research report on Bihar
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because that is also the time of relative prosperity, a small period of time when Bihar was growing at a faster rate.
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And the title of the report was I called it A New Bihar.
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And so that was the only other time when I had looked at Bihar closely.
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And I visit Bihar almost twice every year because my parents are there still.
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So I go visit them. Sometimes they come and visit me in Delhi.
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So that was one time that I had studied Bihar.
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Other than that, I go to my hometown, either take a train or fly down to Patna, then take a train to my hometown and come back.
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But never had looked closely what was the reason.
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And when Mohit explained to me about that surprising per capita and the global context in which you can put it, it was extremely surprising.
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I was like, I have never tried and understand exactly why this girl you generally write it off as if, OK, this is a particular case and there is nothing much is going to happen or that there was no instigation probably to do a deeper inquiry.
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So this was a good opportunity to kind of take a trip.
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And so after, say, 12 years after that, I had done 10, 11 years after I had done the report, another chance to kind of look deeper into it.
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And the big contrast was then in 2011 when in the reports, I had concluded that Bihar is about to take off because like everyone knows, the first term of Nitish Kumar as the Chief Minister 2005 to 2010 was growing really well.
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It was the talk of the town in the country. Everyone's talking about the high per capita GDP numbers and the growth rate was second probably only to Gujarat for those five years and almost neck and neck.
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So, of course, the base was very low, but it was growing at a very fast rate.
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And some of the basic, you know, bare minimums for the next level takeoff were ready, key among them being law and order situation was fixed.
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Then the roads and electricity, which is power, those major public goods, so to say, were kind of taken care of and decent investments were being made in human capital, particularly education.
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So some of those building blocks of which you say that, okay, government role is to do these public goods and they had been taken care of.
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Now, the only thing missing is private investment to come in and for Bihar to go to the next step, jump into economic growth.
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But that never happened. And I'm sorry, but I never kind of looked deeply into it closely, except for the headlines that you see, which is mostly to do with politics.
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So this time we got an opportunity to talk to some people who could probably shed some light into the nuances of it.
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What are the inner mechanisms? I think it will never be anywhere.
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You can never get a full picture, but it kind of gives you an idea.
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So it was eye opening in some sense.
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And, you know, one would typically imagine that within a country or many states, now the borders are porous between states.
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You can go anywhere at any point in time.
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And at one level, this might explain that, you know, if a state is backward to begin with, like Bihar is, then obviously many people are constantly going out to the big cities, et cetera, et cetera.
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And that's a natural movement and that can become a sort of a vicious circle.
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But at another level, all the states have their own governments.
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We have at least nominally a federal structure.
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You would imagine that the states are competing with each other, that even the Bihar government will want to fix all of this.
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As for a while, it seemed that the Kumar's government was doing and you get those basics together, you get those fundamentals together.
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And then the states are competing with each other.
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And that can create a virtuous cycle where all the states competing with each other lift each other.
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However, our federal structure is not quite so federal.
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It doesn't quite work exactly like that.
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And that process hasn't played out.
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So even before, you know, we actually go to the road trip and talk about your specific insights from that.
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What is, can you give me some insight into your prior thinking on the structures that I spoke about?
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You know, because theoretically at one level, you would expect that, you know, even if Bihar remains last, it will at least be competing.
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You know, there was a famous advertising slogan, Avis versus Hertz, where at one point Hertz was number one.
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And if I remember correctly, and Avis was behind them, and Avis had this fantastic line.
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It's a legendary line among copywriters.
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We are number two. We try harder.
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So you would imagine that someone who's lagging behind, the only way is up.
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And, you know, you try harder. And what else do you do?
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So why did it not work out like that?
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Like, you know, something that you've pointed out, Mohit, is that you look at other countries like the US,
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the disparity between the richest state and the poorest state is nowhere near as much as this.
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It's about two is to one.
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Yeah. And this is just completely ridiculous.
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The disparity of per capita GDP.
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I really went with a completely open mind.
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And, you know, before we started recording this, you were asking me about what we would say about politics.
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And I have a very poor understanding of politics at the level of elections, parties, et cetera, et cetera.
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But one thing that we learned while we were in Bihar, I think I learned, was that party politics is irrelevant to the political economy of Bihar.
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And we received what I thought was a very, very pithy lesson in political economy from one of the first people we met in Patna.
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And I think it's a great way to analyze the political economy of any state, perhaps of any country.
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And it goes like this. It's called notes and votes.
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So what does a politician want? He wants notes and he wants votes.
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Votes are obviously critical. Without them, he won't be a successful politician.
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Notes you can think of as being both a means to the end of votes as well as a means in itself.
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But in his analysis, notes were only a means to votes.
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So politician wants notes and he wants votes.
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Where does he get notes and votes from?
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And in my own sort of notes to myself, sorry to use the word in a different way, I sort of compared this to the electoral bonds.
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In the electoral bonds, you have got a situation where the notes are coming from the richest people in the country,
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which is largely from whatever one hears, anecdotally, the industrialists.
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The service sector doesn't require to pay notes to the same extent because they're largely outside of governmental policy.
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You know, you think of an Infosys or an HCL Tech or whatever it is, they're not so influenced by policy.
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Whereas if you want to set up a power plant or if you want to import crude or whatever it is, then you certainly are very dependent on policy.
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So you've got the notes coming in through your industrial policy.
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And now you can go out and buy the votes because you've got the notes coming in.
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And when I say buy them, you can put any meaning of the word buy on it, whether it's actually paying voters or it's Rehwadi or Gajak or whatever sweets that you're handing out or gas cylinders.
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So you've sorted this out, the notes and votes in a particular way.
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Now you look at a state like Bihar.
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What is the starting point?
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The starting point is that there's no industry.
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And those numbers are actually quite shocking.
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The entire state of Bihar has 3600 factories of all sizes.
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130 million people and 3600 factories.
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Just look at the density of factories.
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The total number of people employed in the manufacturing business in Bihar.
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Guess the figure, Hamid.
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Mind you, the number of people is 130 million.
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And the factories are 3600.
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So it's going to be some abysmally low number, I'm guessing.
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Even that is an overestimate.
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So we roughly calculated that one out of a thousand people in Bihar is employed in a factory.
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It's an easy number to remember.
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Obviously, we're simplifying it because the denominator includes children and people of my age and so on.
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But you know, it's still an abysmally low number.
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At your age, you could still work in a factory.
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Anyway, so the point is that if there are 3600 tiny factories in Bihar, you're not going to be getting notes from them.
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Those notes are going to be really, really small.
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So you've got to organize yourself to get notes from elsewhere.
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So where are you getting those notes from?
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Anecdotally, you're getting it from sand smugglers.
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The rest of the world, people smuggle gold and cocaine and so on.
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In India, we smuggle sand.
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You get it from sand smugglers.
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Now, of course, Bihar has prohibition.
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So you get it from smuggling of alcohol.
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And most of all, which is common with most of India, you get it from land permissions, converting agricultural land to commercial land or residential land.
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CLU, change of land use, I am convinced is one of the biggest sources of revenue for politicians in India right up to the state level.
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And in a state like Bihar, where there is no industry, that's probably even more predominantly the case.
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So you've organized yourself like that.
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Why should you go after industry?
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Why should you tweak the policies and put yourself out on a limb to get votes from a sector which is insignificant and which is going to give you very, very little votes?
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It doesn't make sense. It's not rational.
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But if you go a little bit deeper, we were told a story which only underlined this,
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which is that when that famous cul-de-sac was hit, when Tata Motors was setting up the nanofactory,
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we all know that they want to set it up in West Bengal.
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It didn't happen. They were desperately looking for land elsewhere.
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Somebody suggested to the chief minister that there's a whole lot of land, which was once industrial land, in the western part of Bihar.
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I think it was in Rohtas because Rohtas Industries was a seminal industry 40, 50 years ago, which had been vacated.
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And there were now squatters there.
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Then why don't we kill two birds with one stone, evict the squatters and get nanofactory there?
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Apparently, the reaction of the chief minister was, you want me to commit political suicide?
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Land is the most precious asset in Bihar.
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Probably the only asset.
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Probably the only asset. Mucking around with it is going to be political suicide.
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I'm sorry, I'm not interested.
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And that was the end of that particular initiative.
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They might still have gone to Gujarat.
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The point is that when you have organized your notes, as opposed to your votes, to be from a couple of sectors, you don't want to change course.
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Because the cost of changing course in terms of votes, which is actually your ultimate aim, can be enormous.
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And another person whom we met said that in the last four years, Nathish Kumar had not met a single industrialist.
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This is really telling.
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So there's no incentive to meet, leave alone greet industrialists.
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And so you've got locked into a vicious cycle.
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That's only one part of the story.
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The other part of the story is do industrialists want to come to Bihar at all or not?
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And we can talk about that.
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But since the question was more about priors regarding political economy, I thought this was such a pithy way.
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And it's going to be a framework for me to analyze political economy of any state or country.
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So I once wrote a limerick for Times of India, which talks about the relationship between power and money.
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The limerick is called Politics.
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A Neta who loves currency notes told me what his line of work denotes.
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We steal people's money and use some of it to buy their votes.
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And this is sort of a uniform story across the country and across other countries.
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It's an interplay of power and money.
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And I would have imagined it's kind of the same everywhere, isn't it?
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But as you just described, Bihar is a uniquely different case because it's just a different kind of economy there.
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There aren't enough industries.
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The source of the money is different and it traps it in this cycle.
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A couple of asides for listeners to just sort of elaborate on two really interesting points that you mentioned.
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And I've got great episodes on those.
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And one is about the change of land use certificate.
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I have a great episode with Shruti Raj Gopalan on the right to property.
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I think it's episode 26.
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And how this really works is that agricultural land is not allowed to be sold for non-agricultural purposes.
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So therefore, agricultural land, because there are far few buyers, only other agriculturalists, quote unquote, who can buy it,
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the price is much lower and the price shoots up the moment the land use certificate is changed.
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So a really common scam.
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And in fact, at one point, this was said that this was a whole Robert Wadra scam.
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What he was alleged to have done is that, you know, bought agricultural land at a really cheap price,
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had the land use certificate changed by the state and then, you know, made a killing by selling it at the higher price.
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So this is one really common scam that the state can perpetrate because a simple thing like changing a certificate just changes the value of the land.
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So it's a pretty obvious scam.
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And I've got different episodes that deal with this.
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And also, when you spoke about prohibition, you know, I am known and in fact, various noble people, women I admire deeply,
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like Paramita Vohra and Shriyana Bhattacharya, have berated me time and again for my criticisms of Shah Rukh Khan.
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And my key criticism of his film Raees was that they got the political economy wrong.
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Because in Raees, one major premise of the plot is that a politician who is insisting on prohibition
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is fighting with a bootlegger, you know, who is selling illicit liquor.
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And my whole point is in the political economy, and there's a very famous essay by Bruce Yandel called Bootleggers and Baptists,
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that bootleggers and the people who want the sale of alcohol to be banned, the people who want prohibition, they are actually hand in glove.
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You know, first the virtue signaling politician will say alcohol is bad, he will ban it.
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And then an underground will spring up, which will do the bootlegging.
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And often the two are hand in hand, their incentives are exactly aligned.
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And so if people looked a little deeper into what prohibition does economically, you know, that would be visible.
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My further perhaps naive question is that, you know, and the moment you said about how, you know,
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instead of going for industry, they'll just keep this going, and I straight away thought of the Tata Nano thing,
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even before you mentioned it, though I didn't know the story, is that one way for a politician who is even thinking of the medium term,
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not even the long term to look at it, would be let me get industrialists in, because once I get them in,
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one, on the one hand, they have to pay me to, you know, make sure their competition is kept out and blah, blah, blah.
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So that's a source of revenue. And two, they will provide employment.
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Like if the Nano factory came up in that particular area, it would certainly provide a huge amount of local employment,
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which would translate to votes. So, you know, even if you take a hit of pissing off some people
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or, you know, maybe the Sand Mafia loses some access to sand, I don't know how that would work.
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But even if they lose some funds there, you are creating pipelines for both notes and votes separately.
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So, you know, I mean, I'll contact the first person that we met that said that on multiple occasions,
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Bihar government, when someone is interested in investing into Bihar from outside, has shown deep interest into it.
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But when the occasion comes to provide them with land, and as you know, any industry, especially coming from outside,
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same goes for India, someone coming from outside to invest in India, maybe more so for Bihar,
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is they want unencumbered land where there are no strings attached, no issues, no legal issues to emanate later at a later date.
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And the Bihar government has completely failed to provide the land where someone is willing to invest money into Bihar.
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So, and one of the major reasons could be that the population density of Bihar is the highest in the country
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among states, which is almost 1200 per square kilometer right now.
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And so to get any amount of land, and the land holdings are very small.
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So you will have to negotiate with lots and lots of different people and different interests.
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And therefore, to go back to Mohit's earlier point, then why it would become again politically a suicide kind of thing
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for the administration.
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Yeah, just to put that population density in perspective, the population density of Karnataka is a little over 300.
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It's almost four times as much. And you see that.
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You see that when you drive out of Patna, you see how closely packed the villages are.
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So, you know, I think it's just worth it underlining this point a little bit about about land holdings.
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You know, the particular nature of India is that what we call a sale of land is actually not a sale of land.
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It is only a registration of a transaction because ownership in India is never total.
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It's only tentative because my great grandfathers, brothers, great grandson can challenge my ownership of the land.
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So all that the government has done for the 20 transactions that have taken place since has entered them into a register.
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My ownership is not guaranteed. It's not.
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There's no transfer of actual ownership.
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And an industrialist who's committing several hundred or thousand coastal factories is not interested in dealing with this bullshit.
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And if there are 10 owners for a piece of land of 100 acres, you can probably deal with all of them.
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But if there's several thousand, you don't want to deal with them.
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And if this was true of the Tatas, the Tatas were very clear that we want land only from the government.
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Then it's equally true of a smaller player.
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And so if the government says, hey, we don't want to mess with this, you're locked in a stalemate.
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The political cost, as calculated by the Bihari politician, which is not my statement, is seen as too high.
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And they are comfortable with the equilibrium.
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And mind you, the urbanization rate in Bihar is only 11 percent.
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And the major cities in Bihar are only hand few, among them being in Patna.
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And everyone who wants to invest in Bihar want to set up something close to Patna because of associated benefits.
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There is an airport station which is well connected.
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And, you know, if there are employees who want to have a decent standard of life, then maybe a state capital, Patna, will do better than most other places.
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And everyone wants to be close to Patna. And close to Patna, of course, there is nothing available.
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An associated point that another contact said, which is, yeah, Chief Minister, one, of course, doesn't want to meet and never meets any industrialist.
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And he has no reason to.
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So to the point you were making earlier about, you know, it will give you job opportunities.
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Our multi-party system and first past the post system require any political entrepreneur to ensure that 30 percent or even 25 percent of the votes are OK.
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The rest 75 doesn't matter.
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So if you can ensure maybe through handouts or other social services that 25 percent of your vote bank is intact, then you don't need to worry too much about ensuring a fast pace of development.
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So when I did my episode on delimitation with our friend Shruti Rajgopalan, Shruti made this great point that a lot of the outcomes at the level of states,
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such as, for example, you know, the relative prosperity of the South and the resultant sort of the population going down because, of course, poor people have more kids,
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while that in the popular imagination, it is sometimes ascribed to better governance in the current day.
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But she points out that even historically this can go back 100 years, 120 years to something that is much older.
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And, you know, and the downstream benefits happen now.
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So it's not necessarily just because of present day governance.
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And I'm wondering about this in the context of what you said about one of the problems in Bihar being small, the land holdings getting smaller and smaller,
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because I would imagine that as land holdings get smaller and smaller, you know, determining a title, determining a clean title to any property and all of that becomes more and more of a problem.
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Now, the thing is that this is a problem across India where land holdings are getting smaller and smaller.
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It is just not sustainable.
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A lot of the recent political movements that have happened are really from to the best of my knowledge.
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I mean, correct me if I'm wrong about some specifics, but it's land holding cast like Jats and Marathas and Partidars,
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whose land holdings have gotten so much smaller that they now are agitating for more reservations and so on and so forth, because that is a way out of this.
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And therefore, I would imagine if land holdings are getting smaller everywhere, it would be a problem all states face.
#
But the way you seem to describe it is that is particularly acute in Bihar, because if there is a this kind of a greater density,
#
then it's actually gotten smaller, faster in Bihar than elsewhere.
#
And to go back to the, you know, the reason I cited what Shruti told me that then I would imagine that the core, the root cause of that problem
#
doesn't lie necessarily in the governance of the last two, three decades,
#
but even further back that if you start with a particular size of land holding as the generations pass, they get smaller and smaller and so on.
#
So I want to just inject some facts over here.
#
One of the facts that we learned is that if you look at what nerds call TFR, total fertility rate,
#
and you look at replacement rate of fertility, that's 2.1.
#
When every woman has 2.1 children, allowing for mortality and so on, the population stabilizes.
#
So I think it's Kerala that was the first state in this country to reach replacement rates.
#
So you could argue some people would stand on the other side, but you could argue that this would be one way in an overpopulated country to look at progress.
#
On that benchmark, Bihar will reach that level only in 1936.
#
So it's a full two generations behind, you know, almost 40 years behind.
#
I want to interject here with one quick nuance and tell me if you agree.
#
And that nuance which I spoke about in Shruti's episode is that both Shruti and I agreed, and I think you guys will also agree,
#
that people are brains, not stomachs.
#
Population is a great thing.
#
But the reason that a falling population is a good metric is that as people grow more prosperous, they tend to have less kids.
#
So it is a sign of progress rather than a determinant of it.
#
But I will add a further nuance there, which perhaps I would not have 10 or 15 years ago,
#
being a classic libertarian and believing entirely in what you just said, which is that brains need to be cultivated.
#
And the only cultivation ground that we know at mass scale, and I also believe in homeschooling and parental inputs and so on,
#
but at mass scale is the education system and the primary education system in this country as a whole,
#
as we know, and you must have had several people on your podcast talking about it as abysmal.
#
We took part in the global, the PISA assessment of education only once.
#
It was almost like we had to create a new category at the bottom of those rankings for where India stood, and we've never done it again.
#
And from whatever I've been able to read on this particular topic, Bihar may not be an outlier, but it's certainly exemplary of the bulk of this country.
#
So you have you have all of these young people, the brains are not being are not being cultivated.
#
And more importantly, they're not being used because even if they are cultivated, they're not finding expression in work.
#
And the very first phenomenon that greeted us as we drove from the airport to our hotel in downtown Patna, we were at a place called Chowk, right?
#
It's called Dark Bangla Chowk. Dark Bangla Chowk. The heart of Patna.
#
Our hotel overlooked it. And we had to get off, I think, on the other side of the road.
#
The car couldn't go around because there were a demonstration at Dark Bangla Chowk.
#
And after having a cup of coffee, we decided that we needed to go and understand the dynamics of this demonstration.
#
We went and talked to some of the young people over there.
#
Some of them were not as young as we thought they might be. What were they were protesting?
#
They were protesting the fact that several of them had sat for the exams to qualify as teachers in the Bihar educational system.
#
More about that. And they qualified.
#
And they've now been waiting for four or five years and their appointment letters are not being issued.
#
Now, this packs several layers into one.
#
One is that you've been educated and the only outlet you can find is to educate other people, not because you see your vocation as being teaching,
#
but because that is a secure job paid by government, pensions, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And when you ask them, what about something else?
#
The answer is a stock answer, which you'll find in most parts of India.
#
But there are no other jobs other than government jobs.
#
So there the numbers are the same across India and Bihar.
#
They're a little bit worse in terms of the ratio of job aspirants to the posts available.
#
But just so happened that the very next day, one of the first senior officials that we met in the government of Bihar was the boss of the educational system.
#
And one of the things that one of the people we interacted with said,
#
the reason that they're not issuing the letters today is because they want to wait till the elections are at hand
#
and they can say, oh, now we're giving the letters and therefore that becomes a positive announcement for the elections.
#
And this gentleman said, no, that's not the reason.
#
Or if it is, I don't know, it may be a bullet, but the issue is that I don't have the budget to pay for these teachers.
#
And rather than defending the situation, it was very heartening to see how deeply he cared about primary education.
#
He said, the average primary school in Bihar has three teachers, employed, working, staffed.
#
He said, no, try and understand what this number three means.
#
It means one is the headmaster or the acting headmaster, acting headmistress.
#
That means there are two teachers and there are two teachers teaching five classes.
#
What does this do for the quality of education?
#
Which goes back to my point that a human being is a brain if that brain is cultivated.
#
But if it's sitting on a concrete platform with two teachers who are trying to teach four or five classes, and two is the average,
#
given the distribution curve, there'll be many where there's only one teacher.
#
What is the quality of education that that child is getting?
#
And this point got underlined when we met another gentleman who was running a coaching class for MBA aspirants.
#
And he told us lots of stories, the struggles of an entrepreneur.
#
But I asked him one question.
#
I said, how many of these people who are attending MBA classes have a chance of making it?
#
He said, because of the quality of the education.
#
So going back to the situation, 20% or 25%, I think, of the students who are attending MBA classes,
#
20% I think, of the Bihar government budget goes towards education.
#
So it's a very large chunk of the Bihar government budget.
#
But it's still not enough because the revenue of the Bihar government is so low.
#
And if you go one step further, the Bihar government, and this is a figure which is the lowest in the country for obvious reasons,
#
the Bihar government generates only 25% of its total revenue internally.
#
The lowest is coming from the central pool.
#
So everywhere you look, it seems as though they've got locked in a really low level equilibrium.
#
Whether you look at revenue and expenditure, whether you look at the importance of industry and the lack of it,
#
whether you look at population density, what that does to agricultural productivity, et cetera, et cetera.
#
Agricultural productivity again, Bihar is one of the lowest in the country.
#
Whether you look at rice or you look at wheat or whatever it is.
#
So there's this really low level equilibrium in which only the politicians seem to be doing reasonably well.
#
And everybody else is...
#
And it does not help that you have policies like ban on alcohol,
#
which would have been one resource for both revenue for the state and second also that the state resources
#
in terms of the criminal justice system, lawyers, courts, et cetera,
#
is not devoted towards enforcing that law which you can do without.
#
So in both you're losing revenue as well as you're enforcing a law which you literally cannot enforce,
#
There are only two mafias in Bihar, liquor mafia now and the other one is sand mafia,
#
which is popularly known as Balu mafia.
#
Balu mafia. I'm going to come back to the sand mafia,
#
but the liquor mafia seems interesting because like you said,
#
if prohibition wasn't there, the revenues from the sale of liquor would go to the state.
#
Instead, because prohibition is there, it's going to the underworld
#
and part of it is going to the politicians who ostensibly run the state.
#
And it's like you pointed out, it's a poignant vicious cycle in that
#
you can't educate your brains because you don't have enough money.
#
And if you don't have educated people and you don't build that ecosystem,
#
the economy is not going to grow and you're just trapped in that low equilibrium as you put it.
#
I'll take a diversion and ask you, what is the sand mafia? I don't get it.
#
Like, why is sand smuggled?
#
So, this is true all over the country,
#
but it's particularly relevant in Bihar, I guess, because there's a little other economic activity.
#
So, the way in which we build in India,
#
which is now actually increasingly redundant in many parts of the world.
#
So, we build with brick and mortar and cement.
#
A lot of the world has moved on where the primary scaffolding is steel.
#
Steel is also more expensive.
#
And in the US and Europe, for example, residential housing is largely wood.
#
But of course, our conditions are different, wood is.
#
And the sand comes from rivers.
#
And of course, we have a problem with our river beds.
#
We have a shortage of rivers.
#
So, for environmental reasons, you restrict the extraction of sand from rivers.
#
The moment you do that, you end up in a classical situation where the demand is more than the supply.
#
The supply is regulated by the state and the demand is being generated by, among other things,
#
the size and the growth rate of the population.
#
And that's when the Bahu Balis or the Balu Mafia move in.
#
And they actually control the movement of sand.
#
And they're very powerful people because they have money.
#
In other states, there's a sand mafia.
#
But then they're insignificant compared to the big industrialists or the drug smugglers or whatever you have.
#
But here they're significant because there's no other game in town.
#
So, total number of rivers and the length of river is quite a lot in Bihar.
#
So, out of the length of Ganga, probably 500 kilometers, 450 kilometers or so passes through Bihar.
#
And there are many, many other rivers which have very, very wide river beds.
#
All the rivers coming from the north and joining the Ganga and so on.
#
So, there's a lot of sand over there.
#
But the extraction is regulated.
#
And therefore, as we know, whenever you regulate something, you have a new mafia coming out.
#
So, before we sort of continue with the narrative of where present-day Bihar is and what your road trip was like,
#
I also want to ask you, Kumar, because you've spent so much time in Bihar all through your childhood.
#
You're from Sahar Sahib and so on.
#
Tell me a little bit about what the Bihar of your memories was like and to what extent that has begun to change.
#
One of the books in Bihar I read while preparing for this episode, though I didn't really get much out of any of them,
#
was there was this essay that must be part of some book but is available as a Kindle single also, I think, on Kindle Unlimited.
#
So, it's a pretty good essay by Sankarshan Thakur.
#
And in that, he's writing about Patna.
#
And I was struck by this line,
#
Which is not an image I would have expected to get from Patna.
#
And later on, he speaks about how what has changed is not visible or tactile.
#
And he says, quote, the real change was happening within the minds and psychologies of Biharis.
#
And I don't know what he means by that.
#
And equally, Amitav Kumar, who's been on the show, has a great essay on Patna,
#
where he talks about three kinds of people from Patna,
#
those who grow up there and manage to leave and those who are kind of stuck there.
#
And sometimes they do well, sometimes they don't.
#
And a third category I've forgotten.
#
But, you know how it is.
#
No, no, he's a great writer.
#
But so, you know, tell me a little bit.
#
Give me a sort of narrative of the evolving, changing Bihar in your head from the memories you have there,
#
what it taught you about India, what you considered fundamental to your understanding of Bihar.
#
And do you feel any of that has changed during this road trip?
#
What would have happened is that you would have been looking around you at things that are otherwise familiar
#
with a greater attention than before, because your whole purpose is to see more.
#
So things you otherwise would just have glossed over, you would have been looking at more carefully.
#
So I'm very curious about that personal journey for you, the way Bihar evolved in your mind.
#
Yeah, definitely. This trip was different because we were meeting these folks and seeking those meetings
#
with the express purpose of trying to understand the Bihar story, what is going on.
#
That was my interest in taking this road trip.
#
Just to give a disclaimer, I think I might be the wrong person to give an overview of the journey
#
or my childhood memories about Bihar.
#
It was very early that I left for a boarding school.
#
In many ways, I was lucky not to go to a government school
#
and left for a boarding school in Koderma district, then Bihar and later became Jharkhand, now Jharkhand.
#
But yeah, until standard fifth, I grew up in a district called Seharsa.
#
It is a small town, about 50,000 people.
#
Any typical small town of Bihar, it is just like that, except more so probably.
#
That region of Bihar, which is about 250 kilometers from Patna, is called Kosi region.
#
The language is Maithili. It's called Mithila region.
#
Apparently now there is also demand for a separate estate for that place.
#
That place has not much of an economic activity.
#
Bihar is poor. You say India is poor. Bihar is poorer among all the states.
#
And within Bihar, the poorest region probably is that Kosi region,
#
which most famously is known for the regular floods that you kind of encounter.
#
So those few districts in that Kosi region, Seharsa is one of them, is ravaged with flood all the time.
#
So my father, who is a banker, so out of one, out of only a thousand people,
#
will have a job in a factory enterprise.
#
There's nothing else. So he's not a farmer and had a regular job in that sense,
#
getting a regular salary, could afford to send his kids with me and my sisters to study outside of Seharsa.
#
So I went to a budget private school until standard fifth.
#
That time, I think, and budget private school is something that you see all around.
#
So Mohith and I kind of traveled through in our journey, went through.
#
And of course, I was able to see more this time than otherwise,
#
because most of the time I was looking out of the window earlier, probably not.
#
So the thing that you see even for the poorest region and the poorest district is private schools,
#
which you call budget private schools, where the fees, probably monthly fees will be around 500 rupees or less or up to 1000.
#
It could range, but on an average it will be somewhere around 500 rupees and coaching institutes,
#
all preparing for kids to go into either engineering colleges or other government jobs.
#
So that hasn't changed.
#
The town, which I, if I remember, try to remember from my recollection from mid 90s,
#
when I used to go around town for my own school, you know, walk from home to school or doing tuitions, et cetera.
#
Not much has changed. The only shops may have changed.
#
They might be selling same stuff. The only shops, new shops which have come in,
#
shops which are selling mobile phones and data cards, data sims, et cetera, or repair shops for those.
#
Outside of that, also there's not much economic activity, no new many businesses, et cetera.
#
Of course, purchasing power has gone up as just as a matter of natural revolution,
#
not because some external impetus or economic growth has grown outside of normal.
#
So a lot more people have bikes. So for a small town like Sarasota, also you will find traffic jams within it and mostly because of two wheelers.
#
So there are times if you go to market for you to come back now, it will, you know,
#
So you have to regulate your time to going to market and not depending on what time the railway crossing,
#
FATEC comes down. So if it is four o'clock, then you cannot go, et cetera.
#
You know, so that is the time when the FATEC comes down, et cetera.
#
So, yeah, I haven't spent a lot of time there, but if I try and recollect, you know,
#
compare last probably 25, 30 years, then those are the only small changes that you see outside of that.
#
Even the neighbor people that I see all around. So my neighbors who and the kids who are aware of my age,
#
those who have stayed back have tried to engage themselves in some economic activity like open a shop.
#
And those who have prospered are the ones who have left the state, you know,
#
where had the means and an opportunity, maybe got into a college, engineering college or, you know,
#
go to study outside and have continued to be outside.
#
I don't know of any anyone who has come back to the state.
#
So those who have lived there have, you know, very small enterprise.
#
They will open a Kirana shop or any other those kind of stores.
#
But outside of that, I don't see much. No limos in West Patna.
#
I mean, I know that I haven't seen that. Let me react to what some Karshans said.
#
So the first you could almost call it. I wouldn't call it a shock, maybe a surprise.
#
When we were trying to, when we were planning this trip, was that except for Ginger,
#
which is the lowest brand in the Tata hotel chain, I didn't find a single brand hotel in Patna.
#
This is a little bit of a surprise.
#
And by the way, in the same para that I read out towards the end of it,
#
he makes a snarky comment about how William Dalrymple should have seen more of Patna
#
rather than stay in the lobby of his four-star hotel because apparently...
#
Yeah. So there are no four-star hotels in Patna.
#
No, there are certainly no five-star.
#
There's nothing even remotely approaching a five-star hotel in Patna.
#
It's not that this caused any personal inconvenience to me.
#
It was just a surprise because the capital city of any state in India that I've been to
#
has a vast number of very, very lavish properties.
#
And this was certainly not the case here.
#
The other thing that surprised me was that we went out looking for food one night
#
I guess it would be called West Patna Mall.
#
One is that if you looked at the external appearance of the mall,
#
the finish, the materials, et cetera, et cetera,
#
it was clear that it came from an architectural idiom that is almost pan-Indian
#
in terms of marble, geometry, facade, et cetera, et cetera.
#
But what was also painfully clear was that there was no money and or intent,
#
I like to think, of money to support that architecture.
#
So there was a certain idea that this is what malls look like,
#
but the economy of Patna could not support it.
#
And this is in contrast to malls that I've seen in a Dehradun or an Indore or certainly a Lucknow.
#
Forget the metropolitan cities of Pune, Bangalore, et cetera, et cetera.
#
And inside the malls, the shops were downright shabby.
#
The restaurant we went to, which from all appearances attracted the nouveau riche of Patna,
#
was in terms of understanding of cuisine and in terms of the quality of service,
#
The serving staff were extra attentive to the point of being obsequious,
#
but they had no understanding of the cuisine.
#
So when you go as an economy through phases of an exuberance of capital,
#
low interest rates, a lot of capital and so on,
#
you're going to have building happening quite indiscriminately.
#
The question is whether that takes root.
#
And it takes root when the local economy supports it.
#
And just coincidentally, we went twice over the last week,
#
victims of the Babi Heimer manifestation, to two Delhi malls
#
for the first time in three or four years with COVID having intervened.
#
And what struck me about the Delhi malls was that they had moved up
#
two or three notches from what they were pre-COVID
#
to the extent that my wife was almost offended as to what place and relevance
#
this kind of uber luxury has in a poor nation.
#
But the point is, my reaction was, if the economy is supporting it, great.
#
And it clearly is because entrepreneurs, whether they're real estate entrepreneurs
#
or any kind, are going to respond to the market.
#
You can make a first mistake.
#
And what came through in Patna was that these were first mistakes
#
which were not supported by the local economy.
#
So I've traveled in really remote parts of India for the last 50 years.
#
And if I were to put Patna in some kind of time and geography grid,
#
I would put Patna roughly where Lucknow was in the late 70s or 80s.
#
Obviously, details are different, et cetera, et cetera.
#
But in terms of overall the sense of infrastructure, the sense of organization,
#
the quality of the housing and the commercial real estate,
#
Many themes here. And as far as Delhi malls being so good are concerned,
#
I'm presuming you mean the Saket malls.
#
And this time, of course, I'm staying at your place.
#
But the last two or three times I came to Delhi, I stayed in one of the hotels there.
#
And those malls are amazing.
#
It's like, hum toh first world mein aa gayi hai.
#
Abhi toh sab theek hai India ke saath.
#
And we've had episodes on easy money and what that did to the economy.
#
And that is no doubt one factor in this.
#
And I'm also intrigued by what you described as perhaps a sizzle
#
and not the sausage of development when it comes to building malls in Patna
#
in a certain way, because this is the ascetic, ase marble lagate hai.
#
But then when you actually see what's inside, there's really nothing happening there.
#
And aside, people often talk of malls almost the same way
#
they talk of airports, that they are homogenized air-conditioned places all across the world.
#
And just as every airport is almost the same, there's a large airport,
#
there's an airport will in the world and all the airports are neighborhoods of that.
#
Similarly, people talk of malls in a homogenous way.
#
But what I found in Mumbai, just within Mumbai itself,
#
is that depending on which suburb you're in,
#
malls have such an extremely different character, which is fascinating
#
because the stores, the chains, they'll all be really similar if not the same.
#
But yet they have a different character and a feel and a flavor to it.
#
Brands inside are different.
#
Sometimes, yeah, sometimes even if they're not.
#
Just a feel of the place is different because of the kind of people and the kind of vibe and everything.
#
I want to make an observation about a phrase that you use, budget private schools,
#
and then ask a larger sort of question about progress,
#
which is sparked by what both of you have been talking about.
#
And, you know, to a lot of people that phrase budget private school may not really mean anything.
#
All three of us have been discussing education for many years.
#
I have many episodes I'll link from the show notes.
#
And I just want to double click on that for a moment because it is a misconception among people
#
that private schools are necessarily only for the elites and only for the rich and so on and so forth.
#
And instead, what we have seen in this country time and again is that in the poorest neighborhoods,
#
because government schools are underperforming so badly and not being able to provide education
#
and parents are desperate to get their kids educated,
#
you have the sprouting of these budget private schools,
#
many of them outside the ambit of the law, who are catering to this particular demand.
#
And when you say budget private school, they're really budget private schools.
#
You'll have an auto driver who'll spend that 500 rupees in a month rather than send his kid to a free government school,
#
which itself is indicative of something that is going seriously wrong.
#
And those of us who speak about the different ways to fix education will often say that,
#
yes, the government has to get a sack together.
#
It's a state's duty to provide primary education,
#
but at the same time also allow the private sector to flourish.
#
And too often they aren't.
#
You'll have a budget private school come up, but then there's a regulation.
#
You have to have a playground this side.
#
You have to have X number this size.
#
You have to have X number of toilets.
#
Now, I would imagine that given that state failure is ubiquitous
#
and the state would continue to fail in feeding our brains, as you put it so eloquently, Mohit,
#
I would imagine that one sign of progress would be the sprouting of budget private schools.
#
Another sign of progress, if we are to look for metrics for progress, would be traffic jams.
#
You know, I did an episode with an intellectual, all of us admire the Dalit scholar Chandrabhan Prasad,
#
and he said that whenever someone in his family gets diabetes, he celebrates
#
because it is a sign that Dalits have moved up in life, that they can get diabetes.
#
So a potbelly is something to be celebrated and so on and so forth.
#
Bunch of such revelations in my episode with him.
#
And I'm going to ask you to reflect and think about other non-obvious signs of progress.
#
Like to me, a traffic jam in Saharsa is a sign of progress.
#
To me, more budget private schools, no matter, you know, where they are
#
and how rundown or decrepit they might be, is also a sign of progress
#
that society is fending for itself where the state is failing it.
#
You know, so if I ask you to reflect on that and think about some other positive,
#
other signs that you might have seen or other possible metrics
#
that might exist in the future outside the conventional ones,
#
you know, what would come to mind?
#
You know, I wrote a piece many years ago for Center for Civil Society's blog
#
called Spontaneous Order, where it was born out of the phrase that I heard
#
from the person who comes to my parents' place to do cleaning and help with my mother's cooking.
#
And she had said in her own style that,
#
mai apne bachon ko toh private school mein hi bhejungi, you know.
#
She works at three, four places in that neighborhood, in that same mahalla.
#
And so probably her total salary would, you know, cumulative income for the month
#
would be somewhere around five thousand rupees.
#
And so her husband is a classic drunkard.
#
So it doesn't work much.
#
So probably she is also supporting him.
#
And she is able to afford to send her two kids to a budget private school.
#
You know, and for two reasons.
#
She had clearly said waha pe teachers aate hain aur angreji ki padhai hoti hai.
#
So teachers turn up because in government schools, teachers don't turn up.
#
And so in terms of aspirations, you know, you could clearly see
#
English matters a lot and their English is being taught.
#
So you put those two together.
#
And she said that this is what I want to do.
#
And she's able to afford that.
#
So and my pet peeve always has been OK, the poor poorest state in the country,
#
the poorest region within that state.
#
And one of the poorest person probably in that area is saying that
#
I will send my kids to a private school, is able to send her kids to a private school.
#
Then who are we spending all this money for, you know, on education?
#
So I don't see any justification for that.
#
All you need to do probably is to remove barriers so that one,
#
she will have access to different quality, different kinds of schools.
#
The price is like in any kind of competition you'd expect in market.
#
The price will come down and quality will go up.
#
You know, so can you facilitate that?
#
Sometimes, of course, the opposite is what is happening.
#
So one small aside, a pet peeve is that I don't see any justification for sponsoring.
#
If at all, maybe there are ways in which you can supplement a direct transfer to her
#
and maybe that will help in other ways.
#
But outside of that, the entire architecture that we have,
#
which supports government schools and the entire enterprise,
#
I don't see a reason for it.
#
More so also because we know and this also came out in our meetings in Patna
#
that the reason for so many people seeking a government job,
#
of course, is one that there are no other opportunities
#
and it is such a great opportunity.
#
Also, more so because it pays you very well and you don't have to work.
#
So no matter what biometric system you are able to put up, you know,
#
you can do all kinds of sophistication, but there are always ways around it
#
so that you can get your salary and you can simultaneously have another job,
#
which could be maybe you are on the farm, on your agri farm,
#
doing your farming or maybe running a shop or another side business.
#
But don't have to turn up to school and you can still get your salary.
#
So, you know, I sometimes make the mistake of assuming that whenever we casually refer to things
#
I have spoken about before, all my listeners know what it is,
#
but that may not be the case.
#
So very briefly in a couple of sentences I want to demystify school vouchers
#
or the direct transfers that you are talking about,
#
that the whole school vouchers movement in a sense is about saying that
#
right now what does the government do?
#
Right now the state funds government schools, incentives are terrible,
#
there is teacher absenteeism, the quality is so bad
#
that parents prefer to spend their hard-earned money
#
to send their kid to a budget private school rather than a government school.
#
And the way around this is that you don't fund schools, you fund schooling.
#
That parents are the best people to decide whether a kid should go to school.
#
So you give school vouchers to parents and then wherever parents choose to put their kids,
#
they get the benefit of the vouchers, they take that money from the government.
#
And what this leads to is competition.
#
Let the government schools compete, let the private schools compete,
#
but the parents are the best place to decide, not some bureaucrat in Delhi,
#
where a kid should go to school.
#
So just demystifying that for a list.
#
I just want to inject some nuance over here.
#
Ideologically, of course, you know that I don't believe that the government
#
needs to be in the business of schooling, even if we were to...
#
Sure, this is like a middle ground.
#
But firstly, I just want to inject some reality over here,
#
which is that if we adjust for parental income
#
and the fact that some kids who go to school come from families
#
which have a history of education and some don't,
#
private schools do better than public schools, but not by a huge amount.
#
And therefore, they're not the magic bullet.
#
Obviously, they're going to be better run.
#
There's going to be more responsibility, et cetera, et cetera.
#
But I think the other issue over here is that it's a little bit like the mall.
#
You can set up a good mall, but if there's no demand for good brands
#
in a good environment, the malls are going to deteriorate.
#
And if you were to say in the mechanistic way that characterizes
#
largely the approach towards education across the world,
#
certainly in India today, then the basic purpose of education is to get jobs.
#
So if there are no jobs to be had, that feedback loop into education
#
is not going to be great because you're not getting the return on that investment.
#
And quite apart from the availability of good teachers in smaller towns, et cetera,
#
I think that feedback loop is also going to operate.
#
And so there, too, you may be in danger of getting back into that kind of vicious cycle,
#
which characterizes a lot of the economy of Bihar.
#
Even though it's not directly related to Bihar and more an India question,
#
that intrigues me, so let me just dig in and see what you guys feel about it
#
because I know you thought about both education and jobs deeply.
#
That feedback loop worries me because simultaneously I find that two things are happening.
#
One is that we are churning out large amounts of graduates and post-graduates and all of that.
#
And the other is that they are freaking unemployable.
#
We are teaching them nothing useful.
#
You have both a jobs crisis and you have a situation where actually in a large number of sectors,
#
you don't have enough skilled people to fill the jobs that are available.
#
And at the same time, you have large amounts of unemployed people who, even if they're educated,
#
really haven't been skilled in anything useful.
#
And there is something systemically broken here.
#
And I would imagine it is broken at the end of education itself,
#
that we need to rethink our entire system.
#
Now at one level, that is obviously like I keep saying,
#
our system of education was designed in the 19th century.
#
You know, kids of the same age study together for 10 years, they do the same subjects, blah, blah, blah.
#
But that's a different matter.
#
The point is that even after that stage, most people who are doing BAs, MAs, even PhDs,
#
are then applying in droves for a lowly railway clerk job which they are hugely overqualified for
#
because their degrees don't actually make them useful in any way whatsoever.
#
So even in terms of signaling value or credentialism and in terms of actual learning, they have completely failed.
#
Like I had a massive episode on education with Karthik Muralitharan
#
where we pretty much discussed everything there is about the subject.
#
But his one core insight that struck me there was that the Indian education system is great for sorting, not educating.
#
So you'll have your, because demand is so much more than supply of education,
#
you'll have these incredibly competitive exams for IITs and IEMs and so on.
#
And they will sort out the brightest minds and those brightest minds will then go to Silicon Valley and become CEOs of tech companies.
#
But you're not teaching the rest of the people anything, right?
#
And this fundamental kind of mismatch, like what the hell is going on and how can it be sorted out?
#
So like what is even a candidate solution?
#
I think that the answer is only one, which is economic growth, because that creates demand.
#
And I think that demand comes first because then schools will be scrambling to produce well-educated minds.
#
Today, everybody can fall back on the point that there aren't enough jobs.
#
So it's not our fault that your kid can't get a job.
#
But at some deeper level, I think this is a very fundamental problem.
#
In fact, you know, one alternative approach to education, it's always been on the fringes, it's rarely discussed, has been.
#
And to some extent, you could say that the IITs embody that, which is that you are a poor nation with limited resources.
#
Therefore, focus high quality resources on a really small number of people who can drive high quality and get the engine started.
#
But that's almost too revolutionary, elitist, it almost smacks of eugenics or, you know, all those bad words.
#
But it does drive that insight, which is that you match the supply to the demand.
#
And the demand is jobs. We are not talking about education in terms of enriching the mind.
#
We're talking about education as a means to employment and feeding back directly into the economy.
#
And if you look at it like that, then I think the master gear is jobs and jobs are created by a robust economy.
#
I would say that's where the focus has to be.
#
And then if you then follow it up with freedom for educational entrepreneurs, unconstrained by bureaucrats, it'll follow.
#
There will be time lags because education is a long process.
#
It's as long as setting up a chip fabrication unit.
#
There will be those lags, but it will follow automatically.
#
I'm of the firm belief that education is not a prerequisite for a faster economic growth.
#
You know, that can come later. It's okay.
#
But economic growth can, you know, if you remove the hurdles to it, it can get started.
#
You can get started on it right away.
#
So it's not like we have not been able to go on a faster economic growth journey because of, you know, our poor education system.
#
In fact, often the causation is the other way that countries will start progressing and then they will focus more on people will focus more on educating their kids and it can come later.
#
Which is exactly the broader point that was made.
#
One number that comes to mind, the person who has done a lot of work about it is E.G. West, who has done the education system of United Kingdom, England, Scotland, etc.
#
He has done deep work into it.
#
And one key takeaway for me from that book was that almost universal literacy was reached in England and Scotland before the first taxpayer dollar was spent, first taxpayer pound was spent.
#
So without any government intervention, there was almost, of course, there was, you know, churches and communities, etc.
#
They came in and but before that, what happened was there was surplus created by the Industrial Revolution.
#
So that came first. For that, you don't need, you know, a certain education system that a kid has to be in school for 12 years or more.
#
I agree entirely. In fact, it is, you know, one of the great problems of India is that we have this default reverence of the state and the belief in the Maibab Sarkar that it will solve all our problems and all of that.
#
But like you correctly said, 100% literacy without the state spending a paisa or a cent or whatever it was, you know, kind of on that.
#
And if you if you just have economic growth, like which parent doesn't want their kid to be educated, you know, so if you just have I mean, but it kind of comes back to economic growth.
#
And in fact, I want to add that as a parallel to what he was talking about, which is the Industrial Revolution and the surplus educated, we have a clear example in India.
#
Infosys takes graduates of engineering colleges who spend four years or five years or whatever it is studying programming, they're not good enough.
#
The first thing it does when it recruits them is to take them to the Infosys campus and educate them for six months.
#
Having his entrepreneurs realized that there is a demand for the output of software, if not engineers, coders, they are ensuring a quality supply.
#
So an entrepreneur will do whatever is required. It just so happens that that demand is outside and they're creating the supply here, which also creates an arbitrage and profit and so on.
#
But the point is that entrepreneurs will find the gap and then they'll find ways to fill it.
#
And if you expand that from a single entrepreneur to like Infosys to entrepreneurs as a class, the same thing would happen.
#
So across India, you see that when people require talent of a certain kind, they will try and ensure that that talent will become available and condense into six months what they've not learned in four years in engineering college.
#
And also just to sort of add to that, you know, what the lack of industrialization, the fact that there are so few people employed in factories within the state speaks to sort of a condensed and concentrated version of a greater problem within India that we never had manufacturing take off.
#
And there are a ton of reasons for this. But ideally, you know, in the 70s onwards, we could have had a manufacturing revolution the way China did.
#
But for a bunch of regulations, laws, structural problems have kind of kept us away from that. And education was never a component of that.
#
That was a route to prosperity and then education would have come later and we would be in a completely different place now.
#
And at this point, I must say that, you know, we have sort of reached a stage where even when there are like one of the reasons that that manufacturing revolution was hampered and it is multifactorial.
#
But one of the reasons was a terrible labor laws, which hurt workers much more than they helped them.
#
And recently when there was a move by a state government to actually get to reform those labor laws, a huge bunch of well-educated elites who should have known better with their MAs and PhDs actually opposed that.
#
You know, pointing out that they care more about posturing and virtue signaling than the poor people they claim to speak about because those laws certainly hurt workers far more and, you know, kept many more of them in poverty than otherwise would have happened.
#
Which is just to say that education isn't a guarantee of good sense either.
#
But you know, to go back to Bihar, we were just talking about Infosys and that reminded me that when we were in Patna and, you know, having talked to people about industry, we met the Bihar Industry Association and so on and so forth.
#
And there was no sense of optimism at all as to the future of industry.
#
In fact, you would say that there was no sense of optimism about the economy of Bihar from 13 out of 14 people whom we had in depth interviews with.
#
But that night in the hotel, I was sort of asking myself, so if not industry, what?
#
And so I asked somebody the next day, we have all these young people over here who are trying to study, whether at budget private schools or in coaching institutes, et cetera, et cetera.
#
Large supply of young minds with an inclination towards academics.
#
Why isn't an Infosys setting up a campus over here?
#
These kids would be so hungry to learn and do things.
#
So the answer was, why would Infosys set up a center in Bihar?
#
It was almost a rhetorical answer and I was supposed to guess the real answer, which was
#
that the brightest of kids are joining IT companies.
#
They have an option of working in Bangalore or Mangalore or Pune or Bombay or NCR.
#
Why would they want to live in Patna?
#
For you to employ those kids who could be from Bihar and therefore say even Patna is a great dream, you also need managers and vice presidents and senior vice presidents.
#
None of them is going to come and live in Patna after they've got used to the glistening walls of Bangalore or Delhi, especially South Delhi.
#
The culture of Bangalore, which all of us know to a greater or lesser extent, is an extremely vibrant, open culture, much more so than most parts of this country.
#
And of course, these things feed on each other, but a lot of it has to do with the young people who are in IT, which is where there's a lot more mobility and there's a lot of money.
#
And you look at the range of cuisines that are available within a three kilometer radius of any point in Bangalore.
#
You look at the number of pubs, you look at the micro breweries, you look at the karaoke culture, whatever it is.
#
How many eons is it going to take you to create that in a Patna?
#
And who is going to make that jump start?
#
No senior vice president from Infosys is going to go and live in Patna.
#
So again, you've gotten to a really, really low level equilibrium.
#
And I must say that of all the answers to all the questions that we asked in Bihar, this one made me feel the most foolish because I thought it was a good question, but the answer was so obvious.
#
Questions like this where the answer is obvious, but you only know it after the fact are also illuminating in so many different ways.
#
Let's go back to your road trip.
#
You know, give me sort of an impressionistic account of what it was like.
#
Like how did you tackle it?
#
Was it really a road road trip?
#
And you know, when you went there, what was you said you interviewed a bunch of people.
#
So what was the mission?
#
You know, what did you go there to find out?
#
How did you plan to find it out?
#
How much of it was talking to these people who who would know how much of it was just going around and seeing things for yourself?
#
Give me a sense of what that journey was like.
#
So, yes, it was it was a road trip, not in the way we originally anticipated or would have liked, which was driving from Delhi to Patna and then through Bihar, because we realized just getting to Patna was going to take two and a half days.
#
So that was five days added to the trip.
#
So we compromised and we flew to Patna and we took, you could say, three road journeys.
#
One was from Patna to the extreme eastern end of Bihar, to the area called Purnia.
#
And as I learned from an uncle of Kumar's that Purnia comes in some contorted way from Purv, you know, so the easternmost part of Bihar.
#
And then there was a road trip from Purnia to the town where Kumar's parents live, the town of Saharsa, and then the trip back from Saharsa to Patna.
#
I think we covered maybe 700 kilometers, but enough.
#
Our trip was reasonably structured in that we sought out and created a lot of interviews before we went and some we arranged on the spot.
#
And we tried to get a reasonably wide spectrum of interviewees.
#
So we interviewed people from the Bihar Industry Association.
#
We introduced an incredibly resourceful and well-connected and deep thinking chartered accountant whose work seemed to be more in helping people navigate the political economy.
#
Feel free to take names and give shout outs when you're saying positive things.
#
Well, I'm not sure whether people like the name.
#
We met the bureau chief of one of the largest TV channels.
#
We met a young, would-be, well, a politician.
#
Had worked at a TV channel, incredibly enterprising and impressive young lady.
#
We met a couple of educational entrepreneurs.
#
We met people in real estate.
#
So a fairly wide top bureaucrat.
#
A very, very top bureaucrat.
#
So a wide range of people.
#
So I think we got a fairly wide spectrum.
#
And we were very lucky in that regard because we also found that people wanted to talk.
#
And one of the takeaways that we had, which was really surprising, was almost a sense of gratitude.
#
That people from Delhi are concerned about the economy of Bihar.
#
Like almost surprised that some Delhi people, that too an entrepreneur, you know.
#
I, as an investor and entrepreneur, am interested in the economy of Bihar.
#
It seemed like nobody else has been.
#
You know, it was really, really like that.
#
And we met a couple of economic researchers.
#
And that was actually quite funny from our perspective, you know.
#
Because I guess most of our interactions with think tanks, given who we are,
#
three-quarters of the classic economic libertarians in this country sitting in this room as of now.
#
I got to tell you, yesterday I recorded with Yamini Iyer.
#
And we met for lunch at your place before that.
#
And when we were taking a cab here, she happened to mention that, you know, Amit,
#
she didn't use exactly these words, but I will be morbid and talk about death.
#
And she said that, you know, if you, Barun and Mohit were in a crash together,
#
India would lose all its libertarians.
#
But it's actually in only three-quarters because young Kumar would not be in that crash, one hopes.
#
You know, I was quite taken aback by the fact that this so-called think tank was actually only a place
#
set up to mass produce preconceived documents for the state government, you know,
#
and completely painted by the socialist brush and not taking cognizance of the fact that it's staring you in the face,
#
which is that the government of Bihar doesn't have enough money to run its schools.
#
So where is the impetus for growth going to come from the state government?
#
So, you know, one, I think we were very lucky because also these people were just so incredibly hospitable.
#
People we'd never met before.
#
This chartered accountant, whom I was a contact of a contact of a contact,
#
He sent a car to the airport to pick us up, to drop us at our hotel,
#
wait while we checked in, had a cup of coffee, engaged with those unemployed teachers striking on the street
#
and to take us to his hotel.
#
When we went to meet the Bihar Industry Association head, he sent his car to drop us back to our hotel.
#
It just went on and on like that.
#
I can guess why they did that though.
#
They must have googled your names and realized that you have both been frequent guests on the scene and the on scene.
#
So obviously send a car.
#
We were all bathing in the glory of our friend Amit Verma.
#
May benefit glorious nation of scene on scene.
#
Almost everyone was super honest and frank in sharing their views and vocal.
#
This senior bureaucrat whom we met started off by being a little guarded.
#
And I think Kumar asked him if he could take notes and he said no.
#
And I thought, oh, oh, this means he's going to be really, really close.
#
But he wasn't. He was so open, so frank.
#
And as a result, what came through was that he was a really, really concerned person.
#
He was concerned about the future of his state, but was not seeing it going anywhere.
#
You know, but I want to...
#
You should know that that person has since moved out of that department into something else.
#
That sounds really sinister. I hope they're okay.
#
You met Mohit Satyanand without asking us.
#
I want to talk a little bit about the first, the road journey and some of the visual impressions.
#
So as you left Patna, you went through a sort of a penumbra of construction, construction sites.
#
And this is typical of any town in India, small, medium, large or metropolitan city.
#
Whether you take a Bangalore or Patna, I mean a Bangalore or Pune, or you talk about Halwani and Kathgodam,
#
which are towns which many people may not know of.
#
I pass through them very frequently on the way to my mountain home.
#
Every urban or semi-urban agglomeration in India is characterized by this huge penumbra of construction sites.
#
A friend of mine from US was coming to India for the first time.
#
And she went back after two weeks in India, traveling through mostly North India.
#
And she had one phrase, she said that the sound of India is the sound of construction.
#
Absolutely right. Lovely line.
#
But once you left that penumbra, the four or five very strong visual memories that I have,
#
the first which we shared was once we moved into the purely rural areas,
#
we saw this village, which was about a kilometer away from the road, perched on a small eminence.
#
And between us and the village was a stretch of green.
#
And the first thing that struck me was the color.
#
The color of the village was a reddish brown.
#
And this was, you know, that sort of visual dissonance.
#
This is not what villages look like.
#
And then I remarked to Kumar, I said, how many of those villages are plastered and painted?
#
How many of those village homes?
#
Very few, maybe one in 20 or 30.
#
And this was not a texture which I've seen in many, many years,
#
because now you drive through the countryside, village homes are painted.
#
They may not even be plastered, but they're painted.
#
These were unplastered, unpainted. Everything was just brick red.
#
The second thing which it took me a while to realize was that between Patna and Poorniham,
#
there's the famous Baroni complex, which was a refinery and so on and so forth,
#
which was a state enterprise, which was set up at the time of, you know,
#
the state is going to be the driver of industrialization in India.
#
Apart from that, and a few brick kilns when our road passed very close to the course of the Ganga,
#
did not see a single factory, not a single furnace, not a single chimney.
#
This was something for somebody like me who has been driving through UP.
#
Which is not exactly the industrial powerhouse of India for the last 45 or 50 years.
#
I have not seen anything like this, that you can pass through 250 kilometers of India
#
and not see one single industrial enterprise.
#
So maybe just as those traffic jams can be metrics of how well we are doing,
#
this is a metric for how poorly we are doing.
#
Absolutely. It was just striking.
#
And we didn't encounter much traffic either.
#
There was no traffic either.
#
So this was the second thing that really, really struck me.
#
The third, more or less at this point in time in the journey,
#
which was about two hours outside of Patna,
#
was that the road went into a sort of a corridor.
#
It became a corridor either through a village or two villages on the opposite side of the road.
#
It doesn't matter and that's quite definitional.
#
Now, again, whether it's Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka or UP or Punjab,
#
all the states that I've driven through, I drive a fair amount.
#
A topographical experience like this typically ends in about five or seven hundred meters.
#
It's more or less like an accident that a road goes through an area
#
because of various engineering considerations where they have to go through a village.
#
And then you again come out into a relatively open area
#
where the villages are some distance from the road.
#
Do you know, if I can tap back into my psychological sense at that point in time,
#
it was largely sensorial. It was not intellectual.
#
It was like a mild feeling of claustrophobia
#
because this didn't ease that half a kilometer became one,
#
it became two, it became five, it became ten, it became fifteen,
#
till we emerged from this sense that the road was a tunnel through villages.
#
And there you saw three or four things.
#
The first was that these village homes were no longer the brick homes that we had seen.
#
There was some brick. You were much closer.
#
So you could see that most or many of the homes did not have a pucca roof.
#
The roof was either thatch or asbestos sheets.
#
You saw how close the livestock was to the inhabitants of the village.
#
And you saw that the size of the farms was what would typically be kitchen gardens.
#
And for some reason, one of the sites in that patch of road that we drove through
#
had a very poignant kind of impact on me.
#
It was a vacant piece of land which may have been about one acre large.
#
This was winter, so even though it was 10 or 10.30,
#
it was still that sort of slightly dusky kind of feel to the air.
#
So there was a bit of a dusty haze.
#
Also we were very close to the dry weather, so there's sand.
#
And that piece of open land had piles of manure, of cow dung.
#
It was dotted by translucent plastic bags, which was just refuse thrown into it.
#
It also had grazing goats.
#
And the children were playing whatever they were, gully, nanda, cricket over there.
#
And that sensitivity towards children and the future, et cetera,
#
to me this was like a sign of extreme deprivation,
#
that this is the only playground available to these children
#
in the middle of grazing goats, discarded plastic bags, and cow dung.
#
This is all that the state, the economy of Bihar,
#
is able to give to the children of the nation, to the future of the nation.
#
And this image is such an incredible metaphor.
#
Children playing, plastic bags, grazing goats, cow dung.
#
This sums it up, right?
#
It's an image which I will never forget.
#
It's almost a year ago, but if I was a painter, I could paint every translucence.
#
I could paint that haze hanging over that field.
#
I could paint stunted children.
#
I could see all of that.
#
And the figure, 49% of children in Bihar are stunted.
#
You can say that humans are the brains of the future,
#
but if 49% of them are stunted, Amit, you're forced to eat your words,
#
or certainly chew over them.
#
A stunted body can rarely be a place for a fertile brain.
#
We know that there are connections between nutrition and neurons.
#
The two are intimately related.
#
I'm not speaking as a scientist, but just as a lay person.
#
So, again, this can be a metaphor for India,
#
because stunting in India is higher than in Sub-Saharan Africa.
#
We also know that the person who brought out the latest National Family Health Survey
#
has been sacked for some ostensible administrative reason.
#
So these are inconvenient facts.
#
It doesn't help that his name is James.
#
It doesn't help that his name is James.
#
But there you see it on the ground.
#
You cannot deny it, Amit.
#
Those stunted children.
#
So those are the images of Bihar on day one of our road trip,
#
just as the image of Patna on moment one of our arrival in Patna
#
is those striking young people, not striking,
#
demonstrating because strikers are people who have jobs,
#
demonstrating young people because they've not been recruited for five years.
#
They've just been sitting for five years.
#
That speaks of also the fact that there's nothing else
#
that they could do for those five years.
#
These are the images of Bihar that I will carry back.
#
You know, this is something that I would have seen it all the time,
#
but till the time that you have painted it, like the way you have painted,
#
it didn't, it stopped standing out to you, you know.
#
One image that has stayed with me, even though I didn't see it myself,
#
is something that, in fact, Kumara, I got from your description,
#
where you spoke about going through Bihar in an earlier trip, in earlier times.
#
And everywhere you look, there are just young people just standing,
#
and they're just standing, they're doing nothing,
#
they're not there for some purpose, they're not waiting for anything.
#
Everywhere there are just young people standing,
#
just indicating the lack of work, the lack of opportunity, the lack of jobs,
#
which is also an incredibly poignant image and such a waste
#
because all these people are brains, but like you correctly said,
#
you need to have a full stomach to be able to use your brain properly.
#
And that 49% stunted is staggering. That is, this is the future.
#
So, in fact, that image of people standing around, which Amit share,
#
which Kumara shared with you, also shared for me,
#
and that was certainly one impetus for this trip to try and understand it,
#
to understand Bihar a little bit better.
#
But on the third, or whatever it is, day of our road trip,
#
when we went from the town of Purna to Kumara's parents' house in Saharsa,
#
the roads were rural, and they went into the heart of market towns,
#
and those market towns, again, they took me not to a time so long ago,
#
but to the only time in the last couple of decades that I've encountered
#
that sort of level of, for want of another word, rurality,
#
that a road is taking you through a rural marketplace,
#
and that was Tribal MP on a road trip that I took during the pandemic
#
from Delhi to Bangalore because I didn't want to fly
#
and I didn't want to stay in hotels. Anyway, so I saw that in Tribal MP,
#
but I saw that again in rural Bihar.
#
And so we were going through these, we were driving through a market,
#
even though ostensibly you were going from one district headquarter to another.
#
And in the gaps between these market towns,
#
there were houses built entirely of thatch.
#
And the boundaries between the houses and the road
#
were these very peculiar-looking, they almost looked like art installations.
#
And I'd never seen something like that.
#
And we stopped, I don't know whether you remember, Kumar, and I took a photograph.
#
And the best way to describe them is as gobar kebabs.
#
Sikh kebabs. So imagine a Sikh kebab
#
Because they were in Sikh.
#
Where the Sikh is a piece of wood and the keema is gobar.
#
Yeah, but I'd never seen this visually.
#
And they're placed horizontally.
#
They're stacked up to dry.
#
Which means that now when you want to light a fire,
#
you're lighting it with this hybrid fuel,
#
which is gobar on the outside and wood on the inside.
#
So you have the wood lights rapidly,
#
and then the gobar provides a more sustained flame for you to cook your food.
#
But at one level, that sort of art director in me said,
#
how beautiful, how interesting.
#
It visually grabbed me.
#
We had to stop the car for me to look at it.
#
And the language lover in me is just thinking,
#
now I know the origin of the phrase, shit's on fire, dude.
#
So NFHS data shows that only 38% of households in Bihar use clean cooking fuel.
#
Now the other interesting...
#
So I took this photograph of these gobar kebabs
#
and also these houses, which at one level were very romantic looking.
#
If you're open to sharing them,
#
I'm happy to kind of put them up and link them.
#
Yeah, let me see if I have them.
#
And I sent them to my wife.
#
And she said, oh, how picturesque.
#
And I said, yes, they're very picturesque.
#
But these thatch roofs and these thatch walls with gaps underneath them
#
also mean that you have an infant who is now vulnerable to mice and scorpions and snakes.
#
And if it rains and the rains too much, the water falls to the thatch.
#
And you or your child or your parent is then prone to pneumonia or emphysema or whatever it is.
#
So it really is only art director material.
#
I'm guessing the child mortality in Bihar must also be out of whack.
#
Some of the other health statistics are quite bad.
#
And the availability of hospital beds, for example.
#
So, of course, we're switching roles over here, right?
#
Kumar was supposed to give the data and I the story.
#
But anyway, so hospital beds.
#
The global norm is 18 hospital beds per 10,000 citizens.
#
The India figure is six.
#
So, but, you know, depending on the kind of standards you set,
#
Bihar is not an outlier in terms of North India or the Indian average.
#
The outliers, in fact, in India.
#
Just by sheer number, Bihar sheds the average.
#
Yeah, yeah, that's also true.
#
But in fact, it would almost seem as though Kerala and to some extent, Tamil Nadu, they are the outliers.
#
The rest of India is not very different from Iraq or, you know, other war-torn areas or sub-Saharan Africa, etc, etc, etc.
#
So, and the other image from that particular day.
#
And it was really the time of Godhuli.
#
Godhuli being the dust which is kicked up by the cows when they're coming home.
#
Again, a really picturesque kind of romantic image.
#
It was all of that, you know, those thatched houses, the cattle coming home, the dust,
#
which I then realized is endemic to Bihar because of the huge amount of sand on the banks of the Ganga and the winds blowing through.
#
So there was always dust.
#
I never pictured that, you know, that being characteristic of Bihar.
#
But there was always dust in the air.
#
So this was incredibly romantic.
#
But then I saw something which I have again not seen in 20 years anywhere else in the country.
#
I noticed that none of the women who were coming home, either with their children or the cattle, were wearing footwear.
#
They were all barefoot.
#
This in some ways is an outlier because we are now traveling through the poorest part within the state.
#
So $650 could be the per capita income.
#
But right now we are on the left side of the distribution, you know, on the bottom part.
#
Sure, I understand that.
#
And I'm not saying that it's typical of Bihar.
#
But what I'm saying is it's the sight I was seeing after 20 years.
#
And in a sense, you know, when we talk of time and earlier you said that, you know, Patna is where Kanpur was or Lucknow was in the 1970s.
#
And here you're seeing something after 20 years.
#
And there is that, you know, old thing about India inhabiting different centuries at the same time, 90th, 20th, 21st.
#
And I think we in the cities don't get enough of this because we are firmly in the 21st century.
#
And whatever we encounter from a previous time, like the people begging at a traffic signal, they are unseen to us.
#
We are, you know, in our own world and the cocoon of our air conditioned cars.
#
And we don't kind of see this.
#
And there would, I guess, even be that slight guilt that when we do see it, there is a part of our brain which is saying how picturesque it is.
#
And instantly you feel guilty for even thinking that.
#
And there is a part of our brain which is wondering if you're like objectifying poverty, you know, when you're trying to understand.
#
So all these conflicting emotions.
#
Not objectifying so much as romanticizing, which is even worse.
#
So, you know, this point about different centuries.
#
One of the things that Kumar and I do a little bit of, both in Delhi and when we were traveling, is to walk.
#
And Delhi has gorgeous parks.
#
And I guess South Delhi parks are better than parks elsewhere in Delhi, except for Latem's Delhi.
#
And I say this with some amount of personal experience because I cycle across Delhi all the time.
#
And Sunday is my day to explore parts of the city which I haven't seen.
#
And one of the things that I do is after I've cycled an hour, hour and a half into areas, which is to tie my cycle up somewhere and find a park and explore it.
#
And the South Delhi parks are better maintained than those in other parts of the city.
#
But we went for a walk in Saharsa, his hometown, of 50,000 people, you said.
#
And there was not one stretch of even five meters that we walked through.
#
And we spent an hour and a half walking, which you could even remotely call beautiful or pretty.
#
And I think this is another deprivation of the soul, the imagination, the wholeness of being human, that you do not encounter any beauty.
#
Would it be the case that cities have the same kind of hierarchy of needs as people do?
#
That beauty comes downstream.
#
First you have the bare functionalities and I'm thinking aloud.
#
Possibly. But it also has to do with the economics of the state and the kind of...
#
It's classic, you would satisfy your immediate needs first and immediate need is food and water.
#
So the example that you were giving about plastered houses, you would first ensure that you have a pucca house.
#
The first thing that you do is ensure that ghar ke upar ke dharai ho gayi.
#
After that, the next thing you would do is ensure that there are iron bars in the windows.
#
Then inside plaster you would do.
#
And only then you will think about the last thing you do is outside home plasters.
#
So that comes at the end.
#
Poverty precludes prettiness and plaster is somewhere in between, just to illiterate properly.
#
But I just want to extend this a little bit, which is that earlier this month,
#
so I'm talking about July because this episode will obviously play a little bit later,
#
I was in Germany and I've been to Germany before,
#
but like most of us when we travel, we either go to big cities or we go to places of historical or tourist interest.
#
But after a week in Berlin, we asked German friends of ours to take us to destinations unknown to us at least.
#
And we found ourselves in a small town of 19,000 people, to be precise, a town called Quedlinburg.
#
And we were there for two reasons.
#
One was that like Kumar, our German friend is very fond of walking in nature, as are both my wife and I.
#
And so he chose a place where there were ample opportunities to walk into nature,
#
the small mountainous region in North Germany called the Harz Mountains.
#
And also the town itself has some kind of historical interest.
#
I've never heard of it. His wife is a town, civilization, history, culture person.
#
So she could do all of that while we went out into the countryside.
#
And on our second morning there, I said, I want to go for a run.
#
I find that a great way to see a town or a city in something between driving through it and walking through it,
#
sort of fast slo-mo, if we could call that.
#
And on the map, I could see that there was a park very close to where we'd gone for dinner to a French restaurant the previous night.
#
But I could also see that there was a park beyond that.
#
And so I did a couple of circuits of this little park and then I crossed the road and went into what turned out to be
#
not the way we would imagine a park.
#
It was a forest, but it was a forest with pathways.
#
It was a forest with majestic trees.
#
It was also a city park with beautifully cultivated small gardens within it, water bodies and a stream.
#
And I ran for about half an hour in the park, which is not a lot.
#
It's, you know, maybe four or five kilometers.
#
But I realized that I'd only penetrated maybe a third of the park because when I came back, I looked at the Google images and so on.
#
So this was not just a park of maybe five or eight square kilometers,
#
but it was also a really beautifully maintained, designed park.
#
And I had an indescribable sadness at the end of that day
#
that this is something which is available to people in the smallest towns of Germany.
#
And I tried to think of towns in a very literal sense, towns that I know in India,
#
which have a population of 20,000.
#
And now, of course, Sehera has come up, which is a town of 50,000.
#
650 dollars and 60,000 dollars.
#
But here again, I'm seeing a vicious cycle, you know, because if you're not feeding imagination, if you're not feeding beauty.
#
I think if I may think aloud, I think that there are three levels to this.
#
And level number one is where you're barely scrambling for subsistence and blah, blah, blah.
#
And level number two would be something that you do perhaps see in some parts of India
#
where parents have the economic resources to give their kids a goal-directed education.
#
So they'll study for the JEE, they'll study for whatever, they'll get into IITs, IEMs, but it's goal-directed.
#
And their only education is towards achieving those particular goals.
#
And sure, they do well in life, and that is great, and that's important.
#
But the third level is a level in those small towns in Germany where kids have leisure time.
#
Everything is not just goal-directed.
#
You can sit back, live a chilled out life, you have the leisure time.
#
You can do what my good friend Ajay Shah calls forest bathing, where, you know, you take in the air of all the trees and all of that.
#
And that leisure to me is really what you've got to aim for in the long run,
#
not just that everyone has a job and a good life, which of course is, you know, you've got to get there first.
#
But, you know, so this is, so Germany and Bihar in that sense, therefore, are not a world apart.
#
They're two worlds apart.
#
Absolutely. Absolutely.
#
Free time they already have covered.
#
Yeah, yeah. No, so, you know, I mean, Kumar's understanding of it in pure material terms is absolutely spot on.
#
But it can't prevent the humanist in you from feeling a sense of deprivation on behalf of the 99.9% of India who can't experience that kind of beauty, you know.
#
Or that kind of leisure.
#
No, actually, Indians have a lot of leisure because most of them are underemployed.
#
But also as a state of mind where there's no pressure, there's no tension, there's no, you know, I mean, I don't know if I'm being a bit too articulate.
#
You know, as a, not quite, but somewhat orthogonal response to that point about the state of mind when you're underemployed.
#
So I have a lot of opportunities to observe underemployment since I spent a lot of time in a small village in Uttarakhand.
#
And as I've said often, not as a city person living in a rich man's enclave, but being very much part of the fabric of the village.
#
When we moved there, there was no other city person there.
#
And so all our friends, neighbors, associates, whatever you want to call them.
#
The levels of stress about that level of underemployment were much lower 25 years ago than they are today.
#
Because there was no great expectation that that underemployment could be converted into full on employment.
#
One of the things that struck me in a book that Kumar sent me a couple of days ago, which was written by Sanjay Kumar of CSDS Center for Study of Developing Societies,
#
was it interviewed people in Bihar to talk about their understanding of their own development.
#
And a smallish percentage, I forget the exact number, but let's say about 20%, said that the level of development in Bihar was good.
#
And 45% said that the level of development in Bihar is moderate.
#
So that means that almost 70% of people didn't believe that development was backward in Bihar.
#
It is not backward. I mean, there have been progress in the sense that you are moving slowly, but you're moving away from your previous path.
#
But would you call development...
#
Whatever is happening, those things have happened.
#
So I want to read out what Shankarshan wrote about exactly this, where he said,
#
Schools could become busy, criminals could be put behind bars, promise could be delivered, if only slowly, if only patchily.
#
Power is yet to reach most of Bihar's darkness, but there is credible expectation that it is on its way.
#
And this was, of course, written many years ago.
#
And one would imagine that this would be a true picture in the sense that Shankarshan would have got this picture from speaking to one subset of people who would probably have felt this way.
#
But equally, the opposite picture would also be true, which is a lot of what you are kind of describing.
#
And sometimes it's hard to make out because it is so easy to get carried away by one aspect of it.
#
Even in our best performing states, I'm sure you can find areas where there is deep poverty.
#
And even in our poorest performing states, there can be something which does give genuine hope.
#
So what is your sense of...
#
So in a sense, this is what Kumar talked about, the report that he wrote in 2011, which saw a lot of hope.
#
And this book, to be honest, was written a few years ago.
#
So as he said, between 2011 and 2015, there was a lot of hope that Bihar...
#
2005 is when the growth kind of started, the journey, and it continued till 2012 or so.
#
And after that, if I had to just think of a guess of a reason why it kind of went downhill,
#
somehow in case of Bihar and maybe case of most of the states, the change is kind of led from the front by the Chief Minister.
#
And in this case, probably at that time, there was a lot of talk about cooperative federalism.
#
And there were a few chief ministers who were talked about as the next big thing, maybe.
#
Raman Singh in Chhattisgarh, Sivaraj Singh Chauhan and Narendra Modi and Nitish Kumar.
#
And given that the 2014 election was approaching,
#
Nitish Kumar was being talked about in media as the next PM candidate of the non-NDA parties,
#
which kind of, I think, changed the Chief Minister's mind.
#
And he started focusing more away from the governance and the service delivery and the law and order,
#
which he was able to kind of fix to a large extent and continue to build on it.
#
And then I think he let go of that reign and then other political considerations where you have to, you know,
#
change parties all the time, change your coalition partners, etc.
#
So all that happened. But for those seven, eight years is the period when there was a very, very distinct,
#
you know, feeling within the people in the state, the media and what you could see on the ground,
#
which I also kind of did write in the 2011 report, which I saw is a new Bihar.
#
But somehow that never kind of came to be.
#
You coined the term a new Bihar.
#
That was the title of the report.
#
You're responsible for this false hope.
#
Yeah. So as we said, you know, Amit, we covered a reasonable amount of ground in that week
#
and both in Patna and two other towns, two other districts.
#
And what struck me the most was the fact that only one and a half people out of the 13 or 14 people that we met were positive.
#
You know, and these were these were people across the spectrum, right from a grain trader who we met sitting on a roadside Patri.
#
He, in fact, was the only hopeful person.
#
Well, basically, what has happened is that a new highway has come up,
#
which is connecting Patna to the chicken's neck and then on into the northeastern states.
#
And as a result, that part of easternmost Bihar,
#
which is in the natural extension from the heart of Gangetic or North India into the northeast, has become a corridor.
#
And so people who are running trade operations over there can now see a fair amount of honorable trading happening.
#
But otherwise, we didn't hear it from anybody.
#
Even the bank manager is telling us that what happens when funds come into our bank, anybody who makes money,
#
First, they want to invest that money in Patna.
#
And then when they become rich, then they want to invest that money in Noida.
#
You know, the glistening walls of South Delhi are too far.
#
But their ambitions run from Purnia to Patna and from Patna to Noida and not into Purnia, not into Saharsa.
#
And ultimately, it's about money.
#
The money is not going into Bihar.
#
And to meet people across all of these sectors, like we said, you know, education, trade, real estate, bureaucracy, politics and media, industry and I think I covered all of them.
#
Not one positive voice, Amit.
#
It's very, very disparaging.
#
And I certainly was, you know, we weren't choosing these people.
#
These were quite random.
#
So it would have to be an extremely, unfortunately drawn sample to say that these were statistically unrepresentative.
#
And then what we saw with our eyes, you know, and I'm not some person flying in from Berlin.
#
I'm a person who's seen a lot of India for 50 years.
#
That feeling of going back in time was something that you can't take away from me.
#
And the figures that you guys gave that Kumar also shared about, you know, per capita GDPs and the vast differences.
#
I mean, the figures don't lie.
#
What you have done, though, with your account of, you know, the road trips that you made is made it extremely vivid.
#
And that's given me sort of, you know, a really vivid descriptive account of what life really is on the ground.
#
And after we take a quick commercial break and get some coffee into us, I'm also going to ask you to now go one step upstream and talk about what there is in the cities, what there is in policy circles, business circles, all of these people you mentioned you met.
#
What is the sort of picture there?
#
And then perhaps towards the end, we can take a further step upstream and kind of, you know, figure out at the level of policy, at the level of government, at the level of, you know, just that broader view.
#
What's really perhaps move from the descriptive to the prescriptive in some sense, if we are not all completely hopeless by then.
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Welcome back to The Seen and the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Mohit Sathyanand and Kumar Anand.
#
We're talking about their road trip through Bihar and everything they learned there.
#
And the answer, of course, is 42 Harada.
#
Kindly explain why is the answer 74?
#
I think this is in the realm of political economy.
#
So I think Kumar is much better placed to explain that.
#
I think it came up in one of the meetings and then again was repeated in once or twice.
#
It just says that the two people who are responsible for economic fortune, misfortune of Bihar for the last 30 years and continue to do so are Lalu Prasad Yadav and Nitish Kumar.
#
And they both saw their fortunes as political entrepreneurs.
#
But the journey started from the JP revolution, the JP movement of 1974.
#
And all their own ideology, et cetera, all emanates from there.
#
So therefore, the two major players of economics and politics and the political economy, et cetera, are graduates of 1974.
#
Therefore, they are called 1974 batch.
#
But why is that the answer?
#
That should be the problem.
#
It's the answer to why there is a problem.
#
That's why there is a problem.
#
So what you did was we spoke about the road trip outside Bihar, going to Purnia, going to, you know, Patna to Purnia.
#
In Bihar, outside of Patna.
#
In Bihar, that's what I meant.
#
In my old age, I say these things sometimes.
#
And one got a granular view of the lives of people of Bihar from that point of view.
#
But you also met a bunch of people when you went to Patna who were who would also have had a closer view of Bihar, but equally a broader view of Bihar than the people you were speaking with earlier.
#
Because, you know, everyone you encountered before that would have been engrossed in their own little life.
#
And some of these people, like the bureaucrats, like the chartered accountants, they're seeing a wider cross section.
#
They're bringing their frames to bear on it.
#
So give me a sense of the kind of insights that you got from them and the kind of meetings that you had with them.
#
So, Amit, I think we covered a lot of ground there in the first part of this recording.
#
And I think that, in fact, it was they who really surprised us because industrialists and industry associations are almost designed to be ambitious and hopeful.
#
Because the act of being an industrialist is the act of investing and the act of investing is the act of believing in the future.
#
And I didn't see any of that.
#
I didn't see any of that.
#
It was it was like a slap in the face.
#
It wasn't, you know, if these specific problems are solved, we are on a good road.
#
It was like somebody asked me the question, again, a rhetorical question.
#
One of the earliest ITC factories, India Tobacco Company, now ITC, was in Bihar.
#
They now have factories all over the country.
#
Why is it that they have no new factories in Bihar?
#
Why are they not creating any more investment in Bihar?
#
They weren't asking me a question.
#
They were giving me an answer.
#
But this is not the place where you want to set up industry.
#
The charter accountant, Contact of Hours, used this particular term, which is quite telling, is that there is a trust deficit, in quotes, between industry and the government.
#
So many times the government has promised things to industry.
#
And, you know, there are more than 30 states in India, and each one of them is competing to attract investment.
#
So all the states, you know, kind of have to give some, whether it's subsidy or some other benefits to industry to ensure that they come to your state and not go to someone else.
#
So Bihar government, whenever they have promised something, generally they have gone back on their word.
#
And in one particular case, I think the BIA chairman was recounting that the industry association took the Bihar government to Supreme Court.
#
And even after the judgment, the Bihar government has not released the money or whatever, you know, kind of settled and paid back.
#
So many times, you know, in our conversations, it came up that investors from outside who earlier were okay with the idea of thinking about the idea of investing in Bihar have now said that never again.
#
Experiences from their dealings with the state bureaucracy or the political leaders, etc.
#
I just said that can never again we are going to there's a huge cost to, you know, the opportunity cost to their time, energy, investment, etc.
#
So and there are many, many choices.
#
So why bother with Bihar if those, you know, issues persist?
#
If I had to summarize in one particular term, I think it would be policy certainty or uncertainty.
#
So if there is the policy world extremely uncertain and you don't know, I think there was a phrase which was used.
#
It's, you know, next day, what the chief minister is going to do depends on one side, what side of bed he has gotten up, you know, or he can flip his mind immediately like his, you know, coalition partners, then everything becomes extremely, you know, unpredictable.
#
Unpredictable and like I was saying, for investment, one of the key things that they would require is some certainty.
#
Future is uncertain, definitely.
#
But to the extent that you can control that uncertainty here, the policy is adding to that uncertainty, which just makes it difficult for any new investment to come in and therefore any new opportunities to come.
#
And I'm guessing fixing the trust deficit is not something you can do overnight just by promising certainty.
#
It would take a period of many, many years where eventually people realize that, OK, these people are serious about it.
#
And I want to ask about though you were focusing more on the economics and the politics, but I also want to get a sense of the political economy in terms of understanding the political imperatives,
#
because it seems to me that like the way I understand of that part of India, that belt of states is that the same, the similar flawed incentives played out in all of them,
#
that Indian politics is rife with short-termism, that you are always thinking of how do you win the next elections.
#
You are, as you pointed out at the start of the show, it matters how do you raise money, notes and words go together.
#
If you're relying on notes on certain lobbies like Sand Mafia and Prohibition, the bootleggers and so on, then you please.
#
Then you please those lobbies and you don't have to worry about others.
#
But at the same time, A, other states have managed to function within the same set of incentives and do a little better.
#
And B, surely there could be politicians, as it seemed Nitish was doing at one point in the years that you spoke about 2005 onwards,
#
where they could look after the short-term incentives at play, but they could also look at the bigger picture and start fixing this stuff.
#
Like what you describe Nitish is doing, that okay, he's fixed a law and order, things are working again.
#
You know, that will get you the votes because then suddenly everybody is going to say, hey, governance is better.
#
So, you know, that can't harm the guy.
#
And once you start fixing things like the rule of law and all of that,
#
what specific policy environment you have is not necessarily going to lose you votes at the ground level.
#
So I think simultaneously you can play the political game.
#
But if you're a little bit farsighted, you could also play the longer term political game,
#
where you know that economic growth is what you really need.
#
Sounds logical, Amit, but I think that, you know, there's also a certain mechanism that starts playing.
#
It's like being at the bottom of a class.
#
If you've been to the bottom of a class for eight or nine years,
#
the likelihood that you'll reach the top of the class or even the middle in your tenth year is very low.
#
Because you've just got into that very, very low expectation syndrome.
#
So I think this is a little bit like that.
#
And even if you were to sort of expand the lens to all of India,
#
it is the states which are industrialized which are getting more industrialized.
#
And if you look at the data of the number of factories in different states of India,
#
it's literally a barbell.
#
We have the two or three states at the top, the expected ones,
#
Gujarat, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu.
#
And the others are not adding units.
#
The exceptions are, for example, you can say Haryana.
#
It's primarily because of the belt that's contiguous to Delhi.
#
And that's become sort of an automotive belt.
#
Or you could say UP, but it's actually not UP.
#
It's the other side of the Yamuna River from Delhi, Noida.
#
So yes, there was political savvy for the UP government to say,
#
let's create an industrial and residential and commercial belt on the other side of the Yamuna.
#
That's not a dramatic insight. It's pretty obvious.
#
It's tactical more than strategic.
#
Yeah, and it worked well. They did a good job.
#
They planned. They created incentives.
#
Most of all, they did what Kumar identified earlier as being a key factor,
#
which is they bought the land.
#
They bought hundreds of thousands of hectares of land and gradually converted.
#
But they were riding on the wealth of the capital of India
#
and the fact that rich people wanted to live in Delhi as only a second Bombay.
#
But otherwise, the states which are industrialized are getting more and more industrialized.
#
Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu.
#
Other states are not getting industrialized.
#
So I would suppose that UP is doing a lot better now.
#
As I said, only because of Western UP, which is mostly Noida.
#
And it's just that compared Bihar to even UP today,
#
it sounds like Bihar is still stuck in a different time and it's not moving forward.
#
It's moved forward for a few years and then stuck again.
#
And on the law and order issue, certainly in the early days of Nitish,
#
as he said, there was not just this perception,
#
but a strong data-backed suggestion that law and order in Bihar was improving.
#
What we are hearing now is that once prohibition was brought into play,
#
some of the key players in bootlegging are police officials.
#
This makes sense because they're the guys at the borders.
#
They're the ones who are supposed to be making sure that alcohol doesn't come from UP or Madhya Pradesh or whatever.
#
Still it is everywhere.
#
So it makes sense that they're the guys who should be controlling the flow.
#
And if you control the flow, you obviously draw a tap into your own kitchen sink.
#
And therefore, the quality of law and order has gone down again,
#
because they're busy with other stuff.
#
A couple of things that in the first 10 years, the Chief Minister, Nizam Kumar, has done,
#
which one thing is to do those things and institutions improve.
#
And second also as a matter of perception, just on the issue of law and order,
#
one was to start something called Bihar Special Courts Act of 2009 and Bihar Lokayukta Act 2011.
#
So these do two things, which was started doing penalty and confiscations of property for people,
#
including senior bureaucrats who are found to be corrupt.
#
And that also sends out the signal and signals speedy trials.
#
So one cannot get away with the fact that the matter is subjectized and is going for years and years.
#
And therefore, one could say that there's no perception of law and order.
#
Things were getting, there were judgments being delivered and people were being held accountable.
#
He started something called Janta Ke Darbar Mein Mukhi Mantri.
#
So I'm unfamiliar with exact details of what happened.
#
It is just like a classic darbar anyone would hold.
#
A district magistrate holds in a small town and a chief minister holds in many, many other states as well.
#
But the term itself, you know, so from public choice, we learn about public principal agent problems.
#
And then you realize that for him to frame is Janta Ke Darbar Mein Mukhi Mantri,
#
is that it is people's court and in this court, the chief minister is going to be held accountable.
#
So very clearly telling the people that look, you are the principal and I'm your agent.
#
And I'm supposed to do, you know, to deliver on to deliver on whatever a government is supposed to deliver on.
#
And, you know, in many ways that also for those initial few years were sort of these are just examples of how a change in perception could happen.
#
Not only in minds, in numbers and minds of people there as well.
#
So here's a question. And it's a question about mindsets.
#
It's a two part question. And the first part actually comes from a broader picture, the picture of India itself,
#
which I've addressed in many previous episodes where we have spoken about how we had this golden period between 91 and 2011,
#
this 30 year period where the economy did really well.
#
We got 20 years, sorry, and we got millions of people out of poverty and hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
#
And it was a golden period. But that period kind of ended for all kinds of reasons.
#
I've examined in episodes, I'll link from the show notes.
#
And today we look back after what, you know, Pooja Mehra would call the lost decade is more than a lost decade
#
where we haven't kept up the same momentum and have even gone backwards in some ways.
#
And the tragic aspect of this is that there hasn't been a mindset shift.
#
Like the story that I hear about the 91 reforms from even people like Montek Singh Alovalia who's been on the show
#
and many others is that you had a sort of a cadre of bureaucrats, policy makers, even people on the fringes of politics,
#
economists who were working behind the scenes from the late 70s to build a bank of ideas and to build a bank of policies
#
like Montek's famous M document, which could then be implemented when the moment was right and the moment was right
#
and 91 was that magic moment and we got a couple of decades of great change and progress.
#
And today that cadre just isn't there.
#
There doesn't seem to be that the consensus that there once was among policy makers, among bureaucrats, among politicians even
#
that yeah, we got to keep performing. It's really working for us. We got to aim for economic growth. It's a big deal.
#
If economic growth is spoken of today, it is more in a rhetorical sense in the sense of narrative battles
#
where you're arguing about numbers and so on. But that real commitment to growth doesn't seem to be there.
#
And I see like a similar picture played out over a smaller time, the way you're describing it in Bihar,
#
where from maybe 2005 to 2012, 2013, whatever it is, you have a period where everything seems to be going right
#
and there seems to be that mindset that let's go for economic growth, let's fix these problems, let's go for good governance.
#
And then like, you know, it just reverses itself. It's not there. That's a picture that I get.
#
So is that picture accurate? And why, why, why don't you know, are we, are these just lucky accidents that someone comes along with the right mindset?
#
But the ecosystem is still the same Moribund conventional minded ecosystem or what's going on?
#
I have several reactions to that. That's a very rich sort of set of issues to talk about.
#
And the first is that, you know, I think there's been a little bit more than rhetoric from the current dispensation at the national level.
#
So there was this idea of making India. It didn't work.
#
And I think there was an underestimation of what it takes to make an India because as you move up in the economic game,
#
the complexities increase, the competition between nations increases, and all this is happening against the background of a more open world.
#
So it's sort of like going from a small budget private school in Bihar to Delhi University.
#
Yes, your caliber is still the same. In fact, probably getting a little bit better.
#
But the competition that you're dealing with is a completely different order.
#
So I think the idea that we need to up manufacturing was a sound idea.
#
The idea that government needs to promote it was a sound idea, and I think it was genuine.
#
But I think they didn't understand that.
#
And I think this is true of everything in India, that beyond a point, you cannot solve a problem vertically.
#
Everything at the base has got to work.
#
So you can't just solve for manufacturing by saying, for example, we'll make licensing easier.
#
If you, and we've talked about this on this show before, if you want manufacturing to work, especially in a global competitive environment,
#
you've got to fix the electricity. You've got to fix the roads. You've got to fix clearing at ports.
#
You've got to make sure rail transport is efficient.
#
You've got to make sure that the bureaucrats who are clearing documents are clearing them more rapidly,
#
which means that you've got to create incentives for those guys as well.
#
It's at that level. It's not at the vertical level, but it's at the base across several verticals that you need to work.
#
And that we haven't been able to get.
#
So, for example, you know, we talked about this, that if you look at any nation that exports,
#
and we know that the bulk of third world nations have gone from third to second world by exporting and by exporting manufacturers.
#
Maybe India crafts a new narrative because we export services, but there's no example of that as yet.
#
And even though our services sector has done so well, the number of people employed by our famed IT exports is a few million.
#
And will continue to go down.
#
Yeah. Well, so one of the things that you do is that you make rail transport really, really efficient.
#
We've not been able to do that. Rail transport is really expensive.
#
Why is rail transport of freight expensive is because you subsidize passenger freight.
#
Why do you subsidize passenger travel? Because that's a political problem.
#
So starting with that idea of manufacturing, you keep drilling down, it becomes more and more complex.
#
At which point in time, the whole thing collapses and you could multiply this by 10.
#
Some things worked. You realize that, look, if you've got to do this, you've got to move goods across the nation more efficiently.
#
So you remove GST. I mean, you bring in GST, you remove differential tax rates in different states.
#
Great idea. But just the idea is not enough. You've got to build out the implementation.
#
Here, we're in a hurry to do everything. And I think that's a national characteristic.
#
You see it on the roads. Everybody is in a hurry. There's no one way street in India, except in name.
#
We have roads in Delhi. We have huge roads. We have three lanes both sides.
#
But at least one lane will be taken by auto rickshaws or e-rickshaws moving in the opposite direction.
#
Our mutual friend Shruti Rajgopalan once said about me that for Amit, traffic lights are no more than a suggestion.
#
So I fear that you are describing me as well.
#
Yeah. But as a result, we are in such a hurry that we slow each other down.
#
And the net result is that we proceed much more, much more slowly.
#
So I'm just pushing back on the fact that the intent is not there. The intent is there. It's quite genuine.
#
You look at PLI, you know, in itself, it's, you know, you could say this is a good reaction. Again, it's not deep enough.
#
These promotion linked incentives, which are going to industry to increase manufacturing and presumably exports.
#
It's not going deep enough. It's not drilling deep enough.
#
It's not recognizing the fact that, you know, these are adding to the costs of doing commerce across nations.
#
That every time you put a subsidy in place, you are encouraging other barriers from other nations.
#
And therefore you are reducing the openness and the efficiency of an economy.
#
So I think that there's not enough holistic thinking going on.
#
On this same point, in case of Bihar, all the things that you wanted to get done cannot be fixed in those five, seven years when there was good governance happening.
#
You know, there are a lot of historical baggage which you need to clear out and it's going to take time.
#
And so seven years definitely was a very, very small time in the state's economic development history, which has sustained for the last 75 years, has not seen much.
#
So it needed a sustained effort, which somehow for various reasons after seven, eight years was kind of the rain was let go.
#
But the other very important issue which you raised was what is the quality of economic and policy thinking that is going on?
#
And the next level from that, you can have a policy, but then you require laws and rules to back it.
#
And a rule is only as good as the quality of thinking that has gone into it.
#
So it doesn't have huge loopholes and it can be properly implemented and interpreted by bureaucrats and so on.
#
And Ajay Shah has talked a lot about this and that the quality of writing of those rules has deteriorated immensely.
#
But to go back to the central item, which is the ideas.
#
So one of the things that we did in Patna was to meet an economic think tank.
#
And like I said earlier, their answer to everything was more state.
#
And so what we were seeing was not just among the politicians, but also among the think tanks.
#
We were seeing the class of 1974 in full display.
#
And there was no class of 1991 by which I'm referring to liberalization.
#
That's very eloquently put. We need 1991, not 1974.
#
Everywhere. And we even ask this question about the next generation of political entrepreneurs.
#
Namely, one name that stands out is Tejaswi Yadav.
#
So what do you think that if he comes to power tomorrow, will that change things?
#
The answer was same. Who are the people that he has grown around and what kind of ideas does he espouse?
#
And what does he see as an answer to Bihar's economic development?
#
So I don't think it's a radically different thing, which we have seen so far for the last three decades from the 1974 batch.
#
And I guess there's a vicious circle here also.
#
And I'm just thinking aloud that if a politician is used to certain kind of ideas
#
and is used to yes-men and psycho-fans around him, what he is eventually going to be surrounded by are conventional-minded mediocre people.
#
And the conventional-minded mediocre people are not the kind of people who are going to play it safe.
#
There's going to be a status quo bias and you're going to have the same Moribund ideas of the past,
#
like the socialistic ideas that you guys refer to.
#
And that just makes it a vicious circle and there's no way to break past it
#
because you can only enter a politician's circle then by conforming to thinking that is convenient to them, right?
#
So here I'd like to just retain a sense of hope.
#
So I'll draw an analogy here.
#
I don't know Tejaswi Yadav.
#
I've never read anything that he's said or written, if he's written anything.
#
And I don't understand very much more about Bihar than what I've spoken of in the last...
#
He once followed me on Twitter, which is now X.
#
I don't know if he still does, but I think he did, which is a sign of hope.
#
So Tejaswi, if you're listening to this, come and have a conversation and at least you'll have a good time.
#
Right. But I will say this that never underestimate the young of India
#
because in my work as an investor and as an advisor to businesses,
#
the difference between my generation, you know, in their 60s now hitting their 70s and their children is stark, absolutely stark.
#
And there is not a week in my life for the last six or seven years when somebody in their 20s or 30s has not blown me away
#
with their astuteness, with the depth of the work that they're willing to do,
#
and most importantly, with the courage with which they confront their parents
#
and the entrenched status quo forces within the organization.
#
So I could draw a parallel with family businesses that I know and in some cases, three generations.
#
I'm talking of people in the 80s, people in the 50s and people in the late 20s or early 30s.
#
And I found that the people broadly of my generation, 50s, 60s, though I'm pushing the other end of 60s,
#
but people in their 50s and 60s, I found them not out of a lack of intellectual understanding,
#
but more behavioral, not really confronting old realities as hard on as the people in their 20s and 30s.
#
They're willing to confront much more. They are willing to think through much more deeply and find ways around.
#
So I would, if a young person like Tejaswi comes to power without knowing him at all,
#
I would like to retain some hope that he will think out of the box.
#
One number that should also give hope here is that 35% of Biharis are under 15 years of age
#
and only 7% of Biharis are over 65.
#
So when I go to my hometown and come back on Patna Junction or anywhere else in Bihar generally,
#
the only thing that you see all, at least I see all around myself, was people, people, people.
#
And hardly anyone is in their 20s and above.
#
The average age in Bihar is 20.
#
Which is a great sign of hope.
#
Because, you know, the young, especially the young from small towns are so much hungrier,
#
especially the young from a poor state will be so much hungrier.
#
Here's an orthogonal question before I continue down the mindset track.
#
And this question is about, you know, how sometimes when the state is really constraining
#
and holding back a particular society or a particular set of people, it seems that, hey, the state has to change.
#
But also sometimes society can lift itself up without the state.
#
Like for me, the great hope for liberalism is really technology,
#
because technology empowers individuals in ways that politics has failed to do.
#
And therefore I am wondering if the great change will not come from the world of economic policy
#
as, you know, all of us tend to think because we know what is wrong there and what can be fixed.
#
But perhaps it'll just be, you know, it'll come in a completely lateral way.
#
Society solving its own problems through innovation and entrepreneurship
#
rather than looking to the state in a kind of way.
#
So we'll give you a good, we'll give you a good story and response to that.
#
I think Kumar is more familiar with this, but the Jamtara story and what that...
#
I don't know what extent it is. It is a sign of hope, etc.
#
It's responding directly to his point. So I think you should cover it.
#
Right. So it appears that one of the burgeoning enterprises in Bihar stems precisely from what you're talking about,
#
which is the fact that the young people are native to digital technologies and know how to use it to make money.
#
So a young person whom we met talked about her village where suddenly over the last two or three years,
#
she's seeing that not just the Sarpanch, but also a whole lot of other people have a white SUV outside their houses.
#
Now, white SUV in India means prosperity, especially in rural areas.
#
Only the politicians and bureaucrats with extra income have white SUVs.
#
Firstly, it's fashion, right? But I think there's also a very good logical reason for it,
#
which is we're a hot country and you want the air conditioning to work.
#
You don't want to draw the heat of the sun into your black box.
#
You'd rather it reflect off your white box. So I think there's a very good reason for that.
#
But anyway, white SUV. And so she was quite intrigued.
#
Where is this money coming from? And it wasn't what we expected.
#
It wasn't about liquor smuggling. It was about computer scams.
#
I don't know whether you saw this, Amit, but I read a news item about five or six months ago
#
and this was after we'd come back from Bihar, which is that the US government has become
#
extremely concerned about the scams on US citizens, especially targeting the old coming out of India.
#
And the FBI, the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the US,
#
has posted its South Asia senior most official in the US Embassy in Delhi
#
because these scams are coming out of India.
#
And it would appear earlier there was a place which in what has now gone to Jharkhand,
#
which was the epicenter of these scams, which basically come from people hacking into call records
#
and figuring out typically old people in the US who are having problems with their tech or with their banking.
#
And so these young people are calling them up and saying, you know, we will help you.
#
There are lots of people in India who know that whole routine.
#
We will help you. And then they start fishing their credit cards.
#
As a representative of bank or other financial institutions or of Dell or whatever it is.
#
It's now a business of the order of over two billion dollars emanating from India.
#
And Jamtara, which is now in Jharkhand, had emerged as the epicenter of it.
#
And now the Biharis are saying that if the Jharkhandis can do it, why can't we?
#
And one particular story that we heard was about this was told to us by this young woman.
#
And she said her cousin said to her, you know, I also want to become rich like the other people in my village.
#
I also want to do this computer business.
#
And she said, what computer business are you talking about?
#
And he explained to her.
#
So she sort of took a deep breath and didn't want to get into a moral argument
#
because she also wanted to understand the dynamics of this business.
#
So she said, well, why don't you?
#
And he said, well, the problem is that this whole thing is done in English.
#
And my English is not good enough.
#
She later discovered on her next visit that her cousin had a thriving business in this domain.
#
And how did he achieve it?
#
He achieved it by offering a reverse dowry to get a wife who was proficient in English.
#
And the wife and he were now running this business together where he was conceiving it and had backed it.
#
And she was doing the language delivery, the language delivery, a thriving business in this domain.
#
I love your use of colorful phrases.
#
But I agree with Kumar that this is not what gives me hope because this shows that they're innovative and all of that.
#
But this is more exploiting other people than the beautiful, positive, some double thank you moment game of what markets are,
#
where you're actually providing services and making people better off.
#
And the reason I told this story was actually to say that I wasn't seeing any other signs of dynamism.
#
But it's also a sign of apathy at the same time.
#
I wish I had a different tale to tell you, Amit.
#
Because as I've often said, including on your show, that if you say follow the money,
#
my money is invested in India for all my doubts about where we are going.
#
It's invested in India.
#
I think there's enough promise over here.
#
And my responsibility as a very privileged beneficiary or whatever our country has to give us is to invest back into this country.
#
Otherwise, like most people of my generation, one had the opportunity to say, screw it.
#
I'm going to a place where the standard of living is higher, where I can easily tap into much more efficient systems of running.
#
So I have, in a sense, schooled myself to invest in the future.
#
I'm an investor, right?
#
Investing is about future, as I said earlier.
#
And I'm always looking for optimistic science because that's how I make my life, you know, finding sparks of optimism and investing in them.
#
So I'm not a professional pessimist.
#
Professionally, I'm an optimist.
#
As an investor, you've got to be an optimist.
#
But despite that, in a sense, I'm programmed to look for the positive because that's the only way you can be as an investor.
#
It was a short trip, you know, but it was fairly intense.
#
And my antenna were open for 17 hours a day.
#
And as I said, I didn't see those signs.
#
I wish somebody could prove me wrong.
#
There's a great phrase that I think describes me well, which is pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.
#
So I get what you're saying. I think we're all going to hell.
#
I will still play the long game in whatever way I can, but I feel it's probably futile, but I'll keep playing it.
#
But you seem to have optimism of the intellect as well, which is admirable.
#
I think those opportunities don't exist.
#
Like you said, that those glimmer of hope and a couple of numbers that we stories that we heard from our in our meetings.
#
And then all of us have read those headlines in in major dailies about the number of people apply for government jobs,
#
you know, how few seats are available and the number of people apply are quite large.
#
So this is a number that was given to us in one of the meetings from a friend who run a coaching institute.
#
And he said that for 281 seats, 280 odd seats for Bihar Public Service Commission, the number of people who applied for it was six lakh, six hundred thousand.
#
And the number of people who appeared for that exam was three point two five lakhs.
#
So in some sense, one seat for every two more than 2000 applicants and one seat for every twelve hundred or so people who appeared for that exam.
#
So that is one part which those kind of story you get to hear.
#
The thing that was startling for me is that it goes back to the story about the five year wait for getting a government job contract about getting appointed as a government teacher.
#
You know, and therefore the demonstration happening in the heart of Patna is how given that there are no opportunities and there are so many young people who are coming to the job market,
#
joining the labor force without opportunities, how do you entangle them or keep them busy?
#
So the age limit to which you can continue to appear for this BPSC and in many ways getting an appointment is like winning a lottery.
#
And there is nothing else there. Right. There's absolutely no other opportunity.
#
It's not like Gujarat that government jobs are not sought after. In case of Bihar, that's the only thing probably.
#
So the age till which you can appear if you're a general category student applicant is 37.
#
The age till which you can appear if you are a reserved category is 40.
#
And if you are a government employee who wants to move out of your current job and get this more lucrative and senior position,
#
the age to which you can appear is 45. So till 40 and 45 years of age,
#
you know, one way that politicians can, you know, make applicants happy or the number of people seeking the jobs happy is this glimmer of hope that at the end of this line,
#
that there is this opportunity and you are still one of the guys who are holding a lottery ticket.
#
Fascinating. My next question about mindset is this that I asked you about what do the policymakers and the bureaucrats and the politicians,
#
how do they approach the problem? Is there a change in their mindset and blah, blah, blah.
#
I want to know about the people of Bihar, because ultimately, you know, the thing is in the political marketplace, politics is downstream of culture.
#
In the political marketplace, the most important thing is what the public wants. Right.
#
And I want to kind of get a sense of that, because at one level, I can understand that the state has failed you all your life.
#
You become apathetic and you focus on some near term things, either welfare delivery is fine, my cylinder reaches me on time,
#
or you focus on I want a guy of my caste to win, so my work will get done at the post office or whatever it is.
#
But, you know, so it's important for me to also understand that what is your sense of what do the people of Bihar actually want?
#
Because ultimately, the supply end of politics will give you what the demand end wants.
#
So, you know, is it all short-termism? Is it all sort of immediate anesthetics of farm loan waivers and free biryani for voting and et cetera, et cetera?
#
You get the category of thing I'm talking about.
#
Or is there a deeper dissatisfaction and it is simply the case that right now there may be no one who can satisfy that.
#
But eventually, a growing demand will lead to a different kind of political class.
#
So, yeah, in case of Bihar, those things don't exist.
#
Free biryanis and free giveaways don't exist because the state just does not have the capacity to do that enough.
#
They just don't have the revenues by their own doing in many ways.
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Outside of that, there are a couple of glimmer of hope.
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So it's, you know, India is a multi-party system.
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So new political entrepreneurs can come anytime.
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So I know of two such instances where political entrepreneurs are trying to start a conversation, engage in a conversation about economic development, which until recently I had not seen.
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So for many years when I've gone home, every time I pick up my newspaper, which comes to home, which is Hindustan and Dhanik Jagran, the classic two big national dailies and big in Bihar as well.
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And on the editorial pages, what you see, where the conversation about ideas are happening, the conversation about non-intervention is absent.
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It will be either always be about intervention A versus intervention B.
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So the ideas are always to the, you know, more interventionist, which generally does not get you more economic growth, you know, as we know.
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So that was my, you know, takeaway until now.
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But what do I now see that conversation about economic development happening?
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I'm not sure whether there's policy prescriptions will be about development.
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At least conversations started by two entrepreneurs.
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One is of course Prashant Kishore, who is doing this, you know, walk in Bihar for the last over eight months or so.
#
And he's, you know, over eight months doing, you know, in his typical way, engaging with and trying to also have a lot of local support built up, trying to understand.
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And therefore he says, whatever vision document or policy prescription I will come up with, it will be a journey and my learnings through this journey.
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So for eight months he has been walking, you know, and there's and little that I have seen on YouTube, etc.
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Where he talks about trying to exhort people about, are you always going to vote for your cast or for your freebies?
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Have you asking people, have you ever in your life voted for good education, etc.?
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You know, so those are questions which maybe other politicians have never or political entrepreneurs have never kind of engaged with, you know, voters and citizens.
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Another is as a smaller entrepreneur whose candidate that we met on Twitter at least is from People's Party, if I'm not wrong, getting the name wrong.
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Sorry, Popular Party, Popular People's Party could be.
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It's like perpetually planned poverty, which is a phrasing of yours Kumar.
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I'm sure I've got from somewhere else.
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And incidentally, the name of the person who instigated this entire thing was Pushpam Priya.
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So she's PP, popularly called PP, you know.
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So I see that conversation has started to happen, which I had not seen before.
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Still, my one takeaway among other things was that conversation on ideas is missing.
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So they might be talking about, OK, in addition, you know, last 30 years of economic development, which missing development is account of these two people.
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And they've not done anything.
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But I don't see an answer, which is very different from, you know, whatever has happened so far.
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So I hope that it is not just rhetoric and it translate into a different version with a clear roadmap lined out.
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And we have templates around the country from other states, how they have kind of maybe managed to do better.
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But Kumar, I think the question which Amit asked, which I have no insights on, because one was looking for.
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This was a sort of a top down trip as far as I was concerned, is have the aspiration levels of people improved?
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Are they demanding more?
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Have those demands changed from freebies and government jobs?
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Have they changed to a more dynamic economy?
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I put the same disclaimer goes.
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I'm not very kind of plugged in and tuned into conversations on the ground in Bihar.
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But little that I know about from my travels and conversations back with family back home, I don't think that has radically changed.
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And the same the CSDS or the survey that you were talking about, you know, people seeing that development as moderately OK with whatever we have.
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It's not extremely angry and passionate for change.
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That is, you know, it could also be a function of what else, you know, maybe there's an absolute lack of hope.
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I mean, I guess there is hope for Prashant Kishore's family, because if he's been walking for eight months, the guy must be damn healthy by now and all that.
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I'm sure like no problems or pre-diabetes or whatever.
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So, you know, Rahul Gandhi should also be pretty healthy by those accounts.
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In fact, you know, that one encounter that I had sort of bottom up encounter, if you would like to call it, was with that cousin of yours who was staying with your parents in his late 20s or mid 20s.
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And what struck me, Amit over there, was a complete lack of ambition.
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Very little intellectual exposure and almost a sort of quiescence.
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And if I was to try and interpret the social economics of Bihar, this would be someone who would be from the top five percent.
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And this was very striking to me. It belongs to the same generation as my son, for example, you know, broadly speaking, maybe a few years older.
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But, you know, the kids in Delhi who go to, within quotes, good schools, they are so effing ambitious.
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You know, they want to do stuff. They want to break things. They want to move.
#
Ninety percent of them in positive ways. Over the last few days, I've been encountering, as I've been talking to you about, who want to take the shortcuts.
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But not most of them. They're willing to work hard, break their heads against problems and create new stuff.
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But I didn't see that in Bihar. I'm not embedded. I haven't met a lot of young people.
#
But this one encounter was so striking to me because the quality of dialogue, it was almost as though.
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I mean, there was no. He was still so embedded in an old way of living to the extent that he wouldn't even eat at the same time as us.
#
I don't think it's very typical. Amitav Kumar essay that you had shared with us, you know, that essay also, I think it starts out with where Amitav Kumar was invited to a school in Patna or a college in Patna to inaugurate something.
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And before the end, he's recounting how in the classroom, he had asked someone, you know, a bunch of students to write something.
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And no one was able to imagine and paint a picture of what happened last week or something like that.
#
I think, you know, I'm going to speak in defense of your cousin and these people and just say that you can only see as far as your horizons extend and your horizons are much more much likelier to extend really far in Delhi, especially if you're a privileged kid going to a good school.
#
The world of education globalized reading everything on the Internet.
#
If you're somewhere else and you're kind of struggling to survive and the world just narrows down and it's not really their fault.
#
I think then there is a problem to be solved there that how can we widen their horizons?
#
But this is exactly my point that the kids are locked in that same low level equilibrium as a political economy, as the inability to attract industry, as the inability to extract to attract modern service sector.
#
And how do you break out of it? I'm not seeing a way.
#
So I'm going to invoke a frame and I don't know if I'm misapplying it here, but it's a useful frame anyway, which is A.O. Hirschman's frame of exit voice loyalty.
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And I would imagine that if you're a young person in Bihar, you know, you really have three options if you're dissatisfied with things.
#
One is just loyalty to the regime and to the conventional thinking and you make the best of what you can out there.
#
And maybe you do one of these jam Tara type scams or whatever.
#
The other is voice that you become at the center and you raise your voice or whatever.
#
But even there's very little scope for that.
#
And the third is exit. And typically what one sees happening from Bihar and UP and Uttarakhand and et cetera, et cetera, is that you have a lot of exit that I would imagine the brightest minds would leave.
#
It would be stupid not to leave. You leave for where there are better networks, more opportunities, more scope for personal growth and et cetera, et cetera.
#
And you can even look after your family back home better that way.
#
You know, just as in fact, you have left Kumar, you chose the exit version.
#
And and I wonder if, you know, that that really then continues a vicious circle where if your best minds are leaving, you know, what you're left with are the moribund and the mediocre.
#
I was extremely lucky to get, you know, having the means was there and my father was OK.
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You should continue studies and therefore get out of.
#
But the answer was, you know, to get out of Bihar. Yes.
#
I mean, it was not that an answer could be found there.
#
The BIA chairman that we met, he clearly said that and maybe it came up more than once is that Bihar does not have a role model.
#
You know, a role model which youth can aspire and can see and as an example and can, you know, kind of emulate.
#
So, for example, in Bangalore, probably, and India as a whole, you could see, OK, there are bansals, for example, who through Flipkart did well, you know, and how first generation, probably billionaires, et cetera.
#
So such examples within the state of Bihar, if you are living in there, the only role models that you can aspire to are other politicians who have been able to, you know, kind of do better for themselves successfully.
#
Or maybe, like you say, the Jantara examples or being part of an engaging in one of those two, you know, mafias, liquor mafia or sand mafia, et cetera.
#
Because any examples of success and prosperity that comes out of double thank you moments is just is not there.
#
You know, the successes that you see are all from rent seeking, you know, the successes of double thank you moments, which comes from enterprise is just not missing.
#
So this reminds me of an entrepreneur who was looking for funding for his, I think it was his second startup, the first didn't do particularly well, whom I met in Bangalore.
#
At first time I was meeting him, we'd engaged over Zoom calls and so on, but I met him.
#
We went and had coffee at Starbucks and we found ourselves really, really comfortable talking to each other.
#
It wasn't him pitching his business exclusively.
#
There was just a natural sort of warmth and almost a purpose of nothing.
#
He told me, you know, I wasn't particularly interested in studies, but at some point in time when I was about 15 or 16, I realized two things.
#
One is that if I want to have a good life, I've got to get out of Bihar.
#
And secondly, that given my family's constrained resources, I mean, they weren't poor.
#
Father was a junior level government servant.
#
The only way I can buy that exit ticket is by doing really well in my studies.
#
And so he pushed himself out of government school in a small town, doing really well and therefore doing well enough to go to, I forget what it was.
#
I think it was a regional engineering college or whatever.
#
And he's now Bangalore. He's completely comfortable in that fairly high pressure environment, raising funds, mastering new technology, recruiting people, et cetera, et cetera.
#
But there's not even a 0.1% chance that he will ever go back to Bihar.
#
All successful examples that you would know, anyone in Bihar living there, young people would see as role models, maybe, are those ones who have been successful outside Bihar.
#
I mean, possibly. I'm not sure yet.
#
Are you thinking of going back?
#
So it emanates from, again, probably the genesis is the learnings from the road trip that Mohit and I did.
#
And the takeaway for me was, like I said, the conversation of ideas is missing.
#
And so in my various jobs, working in economics and policy, trying to learn, okay, ideas are the most important thing, the power of ideas.
#
And, you know, like Peter Barr, the economist, has said that poverty is the natural estate.
#
You know, so what the key question is, how does prosperity comes about?
#
You know, how do you kind of grow? It's not as if the prosperity is a natural state.
#
So there are answers, you know, well known.
#
And it's not as if those answers are not completely known there, but it would be better to have those answers made available, you know.
#
And so how do you ignite this conversation of ideas about growth?
#
What could be the answer to, you know, for Bihar to break away from this low level equilibrium, et cetera?
#
So I haven't seen any content to that end in terms of whether it is research or writing or even in in mass media, et cetera,
#
the conversation that you see on the local television channels, and there are many in Bihar.
#
So the newspapers, you know, and before coming to the show, I Googled on YouTube and on podcast things about Bihar.
#
So very few things turned up, hardly any.
#
And those ideas about why is Bihar poor and how can Bihar kind of break away from it, et cetera.
#
And when you talk about Bihar, that's probably the only the most important only question being discussed because that's the most important right now.
#
So I haven't seen many answers to that.
#
So I see there is a need probably and an opportunity to start and engage in that kind of conversation.
#
So, you know, we've kind of spoken for a long time.
#
And I mean, I don't know whether to feel depressed or whether to feel hopeful that there is still at least a conversation happening, even if it is.
#
I'm sure everyone who's gotten so far listening to the episode also cares about it.
#
But the question is, like, what do you do?
#
How do we kind of turn this around?
#
You know, you're stuck in that low equilibrium, as you sort of put it.
#
If you have to look back 15 years into the future and think about Bihar per se, you know, what, according to you guys, would be like the best case scenario and the worst case scenario?
#
And what could get us there?
#
The best case scenario, as I said, you have a young leader who sees a 25 or a 50-year career ahead of him and plans accordingly and is able to then prioritize and most of all,
#
most of all, energize people into thinking positively about the future, but thinking which is missing, as we've enumerated right now.
#
Sounds almost unbelievable, but that's my takeaway.
#
It's from a very short trip, but I like to believe a fairly deep one.
#
So I think that's the best hope.
#
And it's got to be internal.
#
I don't think it's going to come from what we talked about earlier, that, you know, India is a vast country and there's free movement across borders and so on and so forth.
#
Because what we've seen over the last 10 years, particularly in India, is jobless growth.
#
So it's not as though there's a huge demand for workers in other parts of the country and Bihar is going to supply it because there's also Rajasthan, there's also UP, there's also Madhya Pradesh.
#
There's no shortage of people, of states with large populations.
#
I think it's got to be indigenous.
#
But the odds are against it, only because of the size, because of the huge handicaps that exist in terms of density of population, social infrastructure.
#
I'm talking about health, education, stunting, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So I think the worst case scenario is, or let me say I would think that the default case is a status quo with a very, very low growth rate and this perpetuity of poverty of ideas, poverty of opportunity, et cetera.
#
I don't think that's the worst case, actually.
#
I don't think the default case, bad as it sounds, is the worst case.
#
Cheer me up, Mohit. Tell me, tell me.
#
Let's do this. I can take it.
#
I'm only saying that in the context that, you know, that we haven't seen it in India and there's no reason to expect to see change.
#
You know, you would almost feel like saying, man, if you don't stand up and make a ruckus about the situation, things are going to get worse.
#
And if in a state of 130 million people, where the average age is 20 million, is 20 years, you have a huge cohort of people between 15 and 25.
#
If they were to actually get energized into saying, this is a horrible situation and we don't want this status quo, that can be a really bad case scenario.
#
I don't see it happening because I talked about quiescence and as in general in India, we've been quite happy to live with poverty forever and ever, unlike unlike Latin America, for example.
#
But I think about the frontal lobe.
#
I think it is a frontal lobe where it has been pointed out by neuroscientists that in the brains of men, in male brains, the frontal lobe takes time to develop and only gets there fully by the age of 25.
#
And that is a part of the brain which socializes us.
#
And therefore, most violence in the world comes from men between the ages of 17 to 25, something to that effect.
#
So that demographic, which would otherwise give me so much hope, you know, also scares me a little bit.
#
So your worst case scenario does does sort of.
#
Hopefully, it will be a very different starkly or right dramatically opposite of what happened in 74.
#
So a new batch, which is not exactly JP, you know, answers, but completely different, radically different and learning the right lessons from freedom and empowerment.
#
Yeah, economic freedom.
#
So my worst case scenario comes from a small story, which in Bihar and small towns, I know that degrees and college degrees, a three year college degree could take you for five years.
#
Five years on an average, you know, even in Patna University.
#
Yes. So what we learned from this trip, and it's almost sounds as if the status quo is continuing, is an MBA college in Patna City.
#
MBA degree being handed out by one of the more well known colleges takes not just two years, but rather four years.
#
At least it could be an exception. It could be only for that batch.
#
So the degree which was supposed to the 2018 batch became, you know, the degree was given in 2022.
#
Those guys who entered in 2018, of course, could be because of covid as well, you know.
#
And what happened is that in the examination of management, you know, paper, the exam paper, which are the questionnaire was from finance.
#
Wow. You know, so maybe a clerical error or whatever it happened.
#
So the students asked, okay, today's was supposed to be the examination about management.
#
So why, you know, we are prepared for management and why we are just not ready to give the exam for finance.
#
So the answer given by the administrators to the students, to the examinee was, and this is what we learned from our contact who worked at the think tank in Bihar,
#
is this paper will remain or after six months you will have to give the exam again.
#
So you decide. So if you want the paper changed, you will have to wait another six months to get your degree.
#
So it's better that you appear in the exam right now, write the finance paper for which was supposed to be a management car and get your degree in four years instead of further delaying.
#
So this is the worst case scenario in which these are examples that I've heard before.
#
So if you continue with the status quo, so that would be my worst case.
#
I'm actually thinking, you know, you and I would be in trouble.
#
People like Mohit and Ajay Shah, they could have studied management, they would ace finance also.
#
But you and I would have been prepared for only for the day.
#
I would have failed even management, so it doesn't matter, but carry on.
#
So in the work that I did in Bombay, in the policy work, one of the key takeaways, the phrases that we used used to be rules, not rulers.
#
That what matters is if you get the right rules, then it doesn't matter who the ruler is, you know.
#
So if the institutions are solid, then the example that we use in the case of US is that even a Trump cannot do a lot more, you know, destruction of institutions if the institutions are solid and their checks and balances built in.
#
But, you know, the trip, this trip to Patna kind of and to Bihar kind of has forced me to kind of rethink or at least in the near term, the hope that I can see, like I said, is a quick change that we want to see can come from the top quickly.
#
So if the ruler is the right person, he can affect change very fairly quickly and get things moving, which happened for a few years.
#
And so, you know, rulers, not rules can also be the answer.
#
And if you want the rules to change and bottom of exam, sorry, bottom of demand to kind of emanate, then that is a long run process, in which case you have to change the, you know, conversation, which is happening.
#
And, you know, is it very starkly different from whatever happened so far, you know, and those that I don't see right now.
#
So new political entrepreneurs, like the two examples that I gave, if they also have the right answers in terms of policy, etc., and are successful politically, then maybe.
#
Well, Kumar, more power to you and whatever you, if you do end up going to Bihar.
#
No, I certainly am going to end up going to Bihar, hopefully soon.
#
More power to you. I mean, most of us are armchair commentators.
#
We just sit in our big cities and sound off.
#
And I can't tell you how much I admire the fact that you actually, you know, sort of taking your skin in the game in such a deep way.
#
And so both of you, Mohit Kumar, thank you so much for, you know, sharing your ideas with me.
#
I'm sorry I couldn't come with you on the road trip, but I'm glad to note that I haven't missed anything without doing the hard work of actually going.
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I've got all the Gyan. So thank you so much.
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode, recommend it to anyone you think may be interested.
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Check out the show notes. Enter rabbit holes at will.
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You can follow Mohit on Twitter at Mohit Satyanand.
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You can follow Kumar on Twitter at Kumar Anand.
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I love how they keep it simple. And so do I.
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You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
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Thank you for listening.
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Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?
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