Although many politicians belonging to these states reacted angrily, Bimaru continues to be used in government lexicon when describing development failures in these states.
Policymakers say Bose’s paper still has contemporary relevance.
“The purpose of academic research is to spur action on the part of the government,” Planning Commission member Anwar-ul-Hoda said in an interview with Mint six months ago. He added that the role of academics is to be honest, not necessarily sensitive. “And the concept of Bimaru is having a desired effect on our planning process to this day because we have started addressing inequities between states.”
Despite such efforts, the differences in economic and population growth rates between Bimaru and other Indian states sharpened in the 1990s.
In 2005-06, literacy rates in UP and Bihar were 56.28% and 47%, respectively, compared with Kerala’s 90.86%. Similarly, the average annual growth rate of population is 2.30% in Uttar Pradesh and 2.50% in Bihar, compared with Kerala’s 0.90%.
The professor also says that Orissa, given its falling standards, would now fit in snugly into the infamous acronym.
“You know, in French, a word ending with ‘ou’ would still be pronounced ‘u’ and Bimarou would not be out of place,” he says. “And one of my colleague’s children, after hearing us discuss how poor the indicators were in Orissa, told her teacher in class that Bimaru included Orissa.”
“Rajiv Gandhi believed in getting the data first for tackling any problem and he would also check the quality of data that was supplied to him,” remembers Bose 20 years later.
Born in Kolhapur in Maharashtra as the son of a tutor, Bose excelled in his studies and in his matriculate examination.
His interest in population studies began at Allahabad University where he challenged his lecturer on Malthus’ population theory. He won a medal from the university for proving the lecturer wrong.
In the mid-1950s, Bose joined the just-started Delhi School of Economics, under the leadership of V.K.R.V. Rao.
His Ph.d. dissertation examined urbanization in India at a time that few predicted the scale and size of India’s cities—and their problems.
He draws liberally from a reservoir of travel tales and shares the most memorable: a trip to Uttar Pradesh in the late 1960s.
A bull rammed into the jeep carrying the team of demographers in a remote part of the state and the animal was killed. The villagers—armed with lathis—closed in on the jeep and were ready to lynch the academicians. It took the intervention of a police officer-turned-sadhu and a Bengali district magistrate whose name Bose used (falsely insisting he was a relative) to save their lives.
One of Bose’s pet concerns is the plight of rural women. Bose says that classifying rural women as marginal workers in the census is a great injustice.
“In the hills where the men have migrated to the cities, the women perform all the agricultural tasks and they work from dawn to dusk. They should be accounted as full-time workers,” he says.