Bihar State Planning Board deputy chairman Hari Kishore Singh at the event in Patna on Saturday. Picture by Ranjeet Kumar Dey

Patna, July 20: Shaibal Gupta, a member of the Centre’s six-member committee fixing new criteria for backwardness, today said that political changes in the state would not affect the state’s economic growth momentum.

“Bihar has undergone some political changes in the recent past (BJP-JD(U) alliance break-up). But I am confident this is not going to affect the momentum of growth that the state has generated over the last decade or so. It is the desire of International Growth Centre (IGC) to contribute towards sustaining the growth process,” Gupta said in his welcome address at a two-day Bihar Growth Conference organised by International Growth Centre (IGC).

This is the third Bihar Growth Conference which allows policy-makers to discuss development policies, said Gupta, co-country director of IGC and member-secretary of Patna-based Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI). “In the coming two days, we plan to deliberate on the economy of Bihar, based both on the findings of IGC’s own research as well as those of other scholars,” he said.

Inaugurating the conference, Bihar State Planning Board deputy chairman Hari Kishore Singh said: “The state has maintained a growth rate of 11.5 per cent in the past five-six years. If the momentum is maintained, it will enable Bihar to catch up with development indicators at the national level.” Earlier, Bihar was branded a failed state but all that has changed in the past seven years, Singh said.