Abstract

The poor management of river and rainwater has resulted in the periodic occurrence of floods in the northern districts and drought in the southern districts of Bihar. This phenomenon has led to unbalanced growth across the regions in terms of both social and agricultural development of the state. The successful implementation of three consecutive 'agricultural roadmaps' (2008 to 12, 2012 to 17, and 2017 to 22) and two consecutive 'Saat Nischay' schemes (Saat Nischay Part-I started in 2015 and ongoing Saat Nischay Part-II started in 2021) has tried to establish the regional balance to some extent. In this study, we aim to analyse the inter-district disparities in terms of social and agricultural development by computing the composite index and identifying the backward regions through the principal component analysis method. For this, we have used the secondary data on selected seven-seven indicators of both the dimensions of social and agricultural development taken from the Department of Economics and Statistics, Government of Bihar and State Level Banker's Committee, Bihar for the year 2019-20. The results from the analysis show that there is a high degree of social and agricultural disparities across the regions such as Patna, Muzaffarpur, and Nalanda are the very highly developed districts while Kaimur, Jamui, and Banka are the very low-developed districts in terms of social development. Similarly, Begusarai, Sheohar, and Madhepura are very highly developed districts while Kaimur, Rohtas, and, Jamui are very low-developed districts in terms of agricultural development. The result of Spearman's rank correlation test (.331) also states that both 'social' and 'agricultural' development show a medium level of significant positive association which means a higher level of social development may induce a higher level of agricultural development. Thus, to establish balanced growth across the regions for ensuring societal harmony the government should frame and interlink the social and agricultural development policies together.