Nitish Kumar visits Buddha Smriti Park, set to be opened by the Dalai Lama on May 27, in Patna. (Deepak Kumar)

The ride from Patna to West Champaran — from the centre of Bihar to its northwestern edge — has never been done in under five hours. Nor has a night run by road ever gone unannotated by stentorian warnings of wayside peril — hold-ups, kidnapping for ransom, often worse.

Champaran was, after all, for decades the capital of Bihar’s most profitable cottage industry: crime. It is conveniently located to flout the law, then taunt it — it is relatively remote from the capital and conveniently close to escape routes into Nepal to the north and Uttar Pradesh to the west.

But Bettiah is a four-lane dual carriage breeze today, and when you get there, you don’t feel obliged to feel relieved that you eluded the highway gangs. “Most of them are in jails now,” reports lawyer and scribe Abhay Mohan Jha. “And the rest probably sense they have lost their protection in Patna, welcome to changing Champaran.”

The unfamiliar, though happy, ring of a promise approaching fulfilment? Isn’t that one of chief minister Nitish Kumar’s stated objectives, to make every corner of Bihar accessible to Patna within six hours?

Yes and no.

Near the end of its first term in new hands, Nitish’s Bihar is a classical half-glass thing — full or empty is a partisan verdict. The blight he inherited from Lalu Prasad five years ago may have been Nitish’s big bounty — anything he did thereafter stood out as a plus.

On the other hand, it could well be that Nitish is beginning to suffer the consequences of his own success, a work in progress that’s proceeding slow on expectation.

Bihar is not under the swish of a magic wand. What Nitish has is, at best, a broom. And no matter how furiously he has worked it these past years, he remains overwhelmed by the debris of decades of dereliction. For everything that has happened, there are so much that has not.

The outlook has improved, but it could be much better. Aspiration has been fed, it is seeking more. You’ll find a refurbished block hospital and “rui and sui” (cotton and injection), as they say, but often not a good enough doctor. You’ll come across a freshly painted government school but often not smart enough teachers. You’ll see a new power sub-station but often no power humming in or out of it. You’ll see the pillars of bridge but no bridge yet.

Jha’s Bettiah home is located in a privileged precinct but is lucky if it gets more than an hour’s electricity a day, water still needs to be drawn from the ground, sewage is a stinky swill across town, attended by all manner of malfeasance.

Bettiah itself is like most other district towns in Bihar, a semi-urban folly that defies correction. A public hospital overrun by dogs and cattle, a rice mill coughing locust clouds of chaff in the main square, a blaring VIP carcade marooned in flotillas of carts and rickshaws, swamps overrun by pigs and mosquito droves, everywhere the familiar and proliferating leprosy of the naked and the underfed.

You arrive seeking evidence to attest statistics of unprecedented growth (11.3 per cent last year, next only to Gujarat) and well-being and you feel a fool fed a fat lie.

Off the big road, it’s the same old despairing demon heaving away in the dust and dung, by unlit night, by scorched day. The deeper you travel, the more twisted those numbers get under reality’s press, and eventually they are torn asunder and cast away because they mean nothing anymore.

Gathered in the shade of a peepul tree on the Motipur crossroads is a clutch of young men lounging on their bundled worldly goods, all arrived from Mumbai and headed home to assist in the harvest.

It’s been three hours, one of them says, and no bus; there came a jeep a while ago, but it was already loaded over with more than 30 or so passengers. Thirty or so, it’s worth repeating, clinging, hanging, perched on the canvas top, men, women, children, elderly, and the driver was willing to pick up more. “Kahan kuchh badla hai?” the wayfarer from Mumbai complains, Hindustan bhaag raha hai, Bihar wahin khada hai (Where has anything changed? The country is racing away, Bihar is stagnant).”

He’s a carpenter’s apprentice in Mumbai and already has a “kholi” (slum shack). Soon enough he hopes to accumulate enough to venture on his own. “Things move in Mumbai, nothing moves here. Look at us, we are here for the harvest, whatever little there is of it, but we will return at the earliest. No young men stay back in the village unless they are wasters. What’s there?”

Fresh paint on school walls, Nitish could retort, and medicines in hospitals, teachers in classrooms and doctors in government infirmaries. Four annas where there were none, something for nothing. That’s what is achievable when you have a broom for a magic wand and a calamity house called Bihar to clean up.

Convincing?

The elections later this year will tell.