Patna: Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has said that with per capita income being one third of the country and low developmental indices in all core sectors, the state would need at least 30 years to catch up with the national average and urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to grant special category status to the state to spur its growth.
The demand has been made by Kumar through a letter written to the PM which he handed over to him during a meeting on December 6 in New Delhi, an official statement said here on Sunday. In his six-page letter, the CM contested a report of Inter-Ministerial Group (IMG) set up by the PM which suggested that Bihar's development deficit needed special resource support to overcome economic and infrastructural backwardness but rejected its plea for special status.
"As if with settled predilections and hurried consultations, the IMG came to the conclusion that Bihar does not have a hilly terrain or a sparse population to deserve a special category state status," Kumar wrote in the letter, a copy of which was made available to media today. Contesting the report, he said, "this was some what ironical, if not contradictory, because on several key parameters particularly the proneness to natural disaster, high population density and being at the rock bottom of all developmental indicators should have led to the opposite conclusion."
Kumar told Singh that lakhs of people from every walk and segment had assembled here on November 4 this year (in JD-U Adhikar rally) to take a collective pledge to continue their struggle till a special category status was accorded to the state.
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