Patna: Japanese ambassador to India Kenji Hiramatsu on Monday stressed on strategic connectivity, people-to-people contacts, cooperation in urban development, particularly in waste management, pollution mitigation and disaster risk reduction as key areas for cooperation with Bihar, apart from Buddhist tourism promotion.

He was speaking at a roundtable interaction, "Japan meets Bihar", organised by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci).

Chanchal Kumar, the chief minister's principal secretary, outlined the key proposed areas of cooperation between Bihar and Japan, which include establishing a semi high speed rail network around the Buddhist circuit, disaster risk reduction, renewable energy, investment promotion, and further enhancing people to people connections - apart from cooperation in the area of Buddhist tourism promotion.

Hiramatsu said the Japanese government is keen to capitalise on chief minister Nitish Kumar's recent visit to Japan.

Bihar is primarily an agrarian economy with cheap labour force. But investments will not come unless the policy uncertainty, which erupted with the liquor ban, and bureaucratic hurdles are removed."

Shaibal Gupta, founder secretary of the Asian Development Research Institute, said Bihar needs to find "areas in both hard power and soft power which could be built with Japanese assistance for the overall development of the state". Hard power, he explained, may involve infrastructure and connectivity and examples of soft power could include rigorous academic and industrial exchange programmes, tourism services, etc.

However, an industrialist who spoke under cover of anonymity told The Telegraph: "It is now in the public domain that the Nitish government failed to realise the full potential of Bihar-Japan partnership despite much lip service. Japan has surplus money and technology on the other hand