As the Congress and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) gets closer before the next general elections, the government is going slow on the demand of Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar of granting special status to the state.
As the Congress and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) gets closer before the next general elections, the government is going slow on the demand of Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar of granting special status to the state.
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The UPA government indicated granting of special status, which means more flow of Central funds for development, to Bihar after Nitish Kumar ended his alliance with BJP. The government had set up a committee under Raghuram Rajan, now RBI governor, to consider Kumar’s demand.
The committee has termed Bihar as second most backward state after Odisha and suggested a formula for increasing Central fund flow for the backward states.
Four months down the Planning Commission has found the committee’s recommendation as not implementable hinting that Bihar will not get special status for fund flow before the 2014 elections as expected earlier.
"The methodology used in Rajan committee report fails to consider many other indicators for backwardness. It also fails to say why Bihar should be granted special status under the existing formula for fund allocation to the state governments," a senior planning commission functionary said.
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The government had decided to go slow on Rajan committee report. The Bihar Congress units want an electoral tie-up with Lalu Prasad’s RJD.
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The government had decided to go slow on Rajan committee report. The Bihar Congress units want an electoral tie-up with Lalu Prasad’s RJD.
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"Giving special status or anything more to Bihar at this time would be considered victory for Kumar," a government functionary said.
The panel has also ruled out National Development Council meeting, which is a must to grant the status, before the next general elections.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
