For 14 years between 1956 and 1970, economist Thomasson Januzzi painstakingly collected and pored over data from five villages in Bihar. What emerged, in one reviewer’s words, was “a detailed picture of… impending doom, for which both India and the world are unprepared…” Bihar was a feudal society with rich zamindars lording over a vast mass of peasants who lived slightly below subsistence. Extreme poverty in Bihar is, thus, not a new problem; neither are forecasts replete with doomsday imagery.
In the first two decades after Independence, the State strove to distribute wealth better, in Bihar as elsewhere in the country. A key policy tool was introduction of land reforms. However, the powerful and oppressive hierarchies of caste and kinship successfully overcame these attempts. Bihari landlords, instead of giving up claims to their lands, chose to distribute it among their kin and, as Januzzi documents, this only meant that “the poor became even poorer”.
