Nitish Kumar and (top) Sushil Kumar Modi

Patna, April 2: His cherished commitment to put Bihar on top on the scale of advancement in IT kept Nitish Kumar busy at its progress review meeting but the chief minister kept an eye on the scores of the big fight at the Wankhede.

The chief minister was quite anxious to know how the game was progressing. “He has been enquiring about the scores regularly in between the meeting,” said an aide to Nitish.

Present at the meeting were deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi, whose son plays cricket, chief secretary Anup Mukherjee, industrial development commissioner C.K. Mishra and technology secretary Arun Kumar. It could not be ascertained what was going on in their minds while they remained engaged in the meeting.

While India and Sri Lanka were locked in the fierce fight to make history, Nitish gave a new name to his government’s IT policy: it will now be known as the Bihar Communication Technology policy aimed at bringing about a revolution in the sector and according it the status of industry.

“The progress in information technology will ensure more transparency in the allotment of land, capital subsidy, electric subsidy and stamp duty etc,” the chief minister said. He also reviewed the progress of officials associated with the IT development.

The new nomenclature is a follow-up on the policy’s vision document for making progress in the IT sector that the Nitish government put in place in the last leg of its first tenure in 2010.

“The progress in IT will enable us to achieve complete transparency in the allotment of land, capital subsidy, electric subsidy, stamp duty etc,” the chief minister said, adding that the development of IT in the state would invite more entrepreneurs and create more job opportunities.

What had goaded the chief minister to put Bihar on the IT map was the fact that India had accounted for 65 per cent of the global market by 2010. But Bihar had made no progress in the sector under the previous regime, epitomised by Lalu Prasad’s famous saying “IT YT kya hota hai (What’s the fuss about this IT/YT)”.

Assisted by his tech-savvy deputy, Sushil Kumar Modi, Nitish’s Vision Document-2010 envisioned “rapid” expansion and growth of knowledge-based economy in the state, bridging the digital divide between urban areas and rural areas and making Bihar the next destination of IT investors.

Modi said the state had caught up well in the IT arena in a very short time creating viable IT infrastructure.