Chief adviser to Nitish Kumar S. Vijayaraghavan delivers a lecture at XLRI on Wednesday. (Bhola Prasad)

Jamshedpur, Feb. 3: What is the success story of Bihar’s rapid growth under the Nitish Kumar government?

A string of reform measures implemented effectively because of some enlightened political leaders. The state has also come up with several new acts and simplified processes that gave a fillip to the growth process — the reply came pat from S. Vijayaraghavan, the chief adviser (investments) to Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar.

Vijayaraghavan made the statements while fielding questions from students of XLRI today. The senior bureaucrat of the neighbouring state was at the institute to deliver a lecture on the topic “Entrepreneurship and Impact Factors”.

Vijayaraghavan admitted that development was a slow process, but was quick to add: “Improvement in law and order and infrastructure development, including roads and buildings, are testimony to Bihar’s growth.”

Replying to another query, the senior IAS officer conceded that corruption had not been completed weeded out. “We have put in place a single window system to reduce corruption. It can be stemmed over a period of time,” he said.

The students also wanted to know how to start their maiden ventures. Vijayaraghavan advised them to first fix priorities and find out available opportunities before taking a decision.

While delivering the lecture, he spoke about entrepreneurship from an Indian context. The bureaucrat took a very innovative approach of case examples from real life experiences to narrate how entrepreneurship could be taken up by anyone without barriers and what were the commonalties between different entrepreneurs.

He subsequently dwelt on the Indian scenario and did a SWOT analysis — a clear assessment of how to factor the various variables to be an effective entrepreneur in Indian context.

The session, which continued for 45 minutes, proceeded onto listing traits of entrepreneurs that Vijayaraghavan had identified by experience and observation.

He ended the session by sharing some relevant and inspiring quotes for young budding entrepreneurs of the B-school.