Bihar Industries and Minerals: Districts and Plants

No chapter of Bihar general knowledge turns on a single date as much as this one. On 15 November 2000 the southern plateau of the state became Jharkhand, and with it went almost all of the mineral wealth and the heavy industry: the coal of Jharia, the iron ore and copper of Singhbhum, the mica of Koderma, the steel plants at Jamshedpur and Bokaro and the heavy engineering works at Ranchi. What stayed was the alluvial plain of the Ganga, rich in soil and water and poor in ore. Bihar's industry is therefore agro based, and its minerals come from the two narrow belts of older rock that the division left behind.

What the division left

The minerals of present day Bihar lie in the Kaimur and Rohtas hills in the south west and in a thin belt of old rock running through Munger, Jamui, Nawada and Gaya in the south east. Nothing of the state is mineral rich in the sense that Jharkhand or Chhattisgarh is, and no petroleum or natural gas has been found.

Sugar, the industry the state was built on

Sugar is the oldest large industry of Bihar and once made it the leading sugar producing state of India. The mills follow the cane of the north west: Champaran, Gopalganj, Siwan, Saran, Muzaffarpur, Sitamarhi, Samastipur and Darbhanga, with well known factories at Riga, Sasamusa, Hasanpur and Marhowrah. Many mills closed in the decades after independence and their revival, along with a state policy to promote ethanol made from molasses and grain, is the part of the story that current papers ask about. Bihar was the first state in the country to frame a dedicated policy for ethanol production.

The agro industries of the plain

Jute is the second industry of the north east, where Katihar, Purnia and Araria grow the fibre and Bihar stands second in the country after West Bengal. Bhagalpur is called the silk city for its tussar weaving, which is sold as Bhagalpuri silk. Makhana, the gorgon nut grown in the ponds of Darbhanga, Madhubani, Saharsa and Katihar, comes almost entirely from Bihar and is registered as Mithila Makhana under the geographical indications law, as is the Shahi litchi of Muzaffarpur, the Katarni rice and Jardalu mango of Bhagalpur and the Magahi paan of the Gaya and Nawada country. Dairying is organised through the cooperative federation whose milk is sold as Sudha, with its large plant at Barauni, and rice and pulse milling runs in every district.

Barauni and the public sector

Begusarai district holds the industrial core of the state at Barauni, where the Indian Oil refinery was built with Soviet help in the nineteen sixties, with a thermal power station, a fertiliser plant and the dairy beside it. Barauni is the standing answer to any question about a refinery or a fertiliser plant in Bihar. The newer public sector units are on the railways: the electric locomotive factory at Madhepura, the diesel locomotive factory at Marhowra in Saran, and the rail wheel plant at Bela, also in Saran. Cement at Banjari in Rohtas, the old paper and chemical works of Dalmianagar in the same district, and the footwear factory at Mokama complete the list a candidate is expected to know.

Why industry stayed small, and what is being done

Three reasons are given in every answer on the subject: the loss of minerals and heavy industry in 2000, the lack of a port or of its own power and raw material, and the floods of the north, which keep investment away from the Kosi and Gandak plains. The state's answer has been to build on what the land does give, which is why the industrial policy leans on food processing, ethanol, textiles and leather rather than on heavy industry, and why the makhana, litchi and silk clusters matter out of proportion to their size. For the examination, the chapter is a list of pairs: a mineral with its district, an industry with its town, and the date 15 November 2000 behind all of them.