Diamond polishing: shopfloor! Patna: according to reports, the state’s first diamond processing unit was inaugurated at the Patliputra Industrial Area here on Thursday by chief minister Nitish Kumar. The unit has been set up by a leading diamond and jewellery firm of the country, Shrenuj and Company. It is widely known that 30% of skilled workers in the diamond hub of Surat are said to belong to Bihar. This could well be a case of reverse migration – instead of Bihari labour heading for Surat, skilled Bihari labour heading back to Bihar to find employment!  The new unit currently... 

    Nalanda: Record breaking potatoes Patna: Bihar’s farmers have done it again. A farmer from Sohdih village of Bihar’s Nalanda district has set a new world record in potato production through organic farming this year. The potato farmer, Rakesh Kumar, has harvested 108.8 tonnes of potato per hectare and set a new world record in potato production, Nalanda district magistrate Sanjay Kumar Agrawal said on Monday. Last year, a farmer of Darveshpura village in Nalanda had set a world record in potato production through organic farming. “Rakesh Kumar has created a new... 

Flowers for cash income: E. Champaran! Motihari:  The cliche in this part of Bihar is – if you want cash, plant sugarcane in your fields. With the revival of numerous sugar factories in Bihar and a supply chain reaching Uttar Pradesh, this has indeed worked of late. But there are other alternatives too – Mehasi in Champaran is fast turning into the Lychee capital of the country. And now with the news of floriculture catching up, more avenues seem open. With farmers shifting to flower cultivation in a big way, East Champaran, from where Mahatama Gandhi tested the potential of satyagraha... 

  Coaching: brain disorder! by Ratnakar Tripathy Patna: Anecdotally speaking, a corrupt Bihari official at every rung in Bihar will use a 3-tier excuse for taking bribes and embezzling money. First and foremost, dowry for a daughter, second fees for a son studying engineering/medicine/management, third, to build himself a house. A Bihari middle class person’s crisp definition of her or his social responsibility is mostly put with mathematician’s finality – ‘I have settled my children’, whatever that means, including perhaps ‘thanks to me, human future is taken care of’. The rest... 

Omkar Realtors and Mumbai’s slum redevelopment business: a case study    Editor’s note: even in an unlikely domain like real estate, it is not just possible but also profitable to maintain the attitude of the retail trader for whom ‘customer satisfaction’ is a very real thing! As real as his bank account and the daily returns. In fact if the biggest retail chains and the traditional corner store have anything in common at all, it is their single-minded focus on customer satisfaction. Such single-mindedness often causes them to ignore employee satisfaction as in the case of Wal-Mart,... 

Sarilchak in Nalanda, Bihar sets a new world record: 135.75 qtls wheat per hectare!   Nalanda/Patna: there are now strong indications that Bihar is producing its first generation of entrepreneurs not in factory sheds or software zones but out there in the fields. This is happening on a scale and is no longer confined to isolated cases, giving the trend the touch of a ‘phenomenon’. According to a latest report, a wheat farmer, Surendra Prasad of Sarilchak village in Nalanda, about 100 km from Patna, has produced 135.75 quintals of wheat per hectare using the SRI (System of Rice Intensification)... 

The story of SIS, a Bihar-based company: how father-son duo from Bihar took it to new heights!   RK Sinha founded security service provider SIS (India) in 1974 in Bihar. Down the years in 2008, his son wanted the Rs 150-crore company to buy an Australian security firm Chubb that was over seven times bigger in revenues. Not surprisingly, none of the senior officials at SIS were enthusiastic. Rituraj, the son was faced with questions: “Who would give us money to make the acquisition? Do we have the management bandwidth to handle such a huge company?” Rituraj admits, “I... 

Meet Anirudh Kumar: a Bihari with a Wiki vision!   Aniruddha Kumar is a very active editor on Hindi Wikipedia, making over 8,000 edits in three years. The 27 year-old Wikipedian hails from Paṭnā, Bihar, and is an Assistant Professor at Delhi University in Hindi Literature. He can speak Hindi, Urdu, English and Sanskrit. Kumar has helped with the development of Hindi Wikipedia, where he devotes much of his time to articles on Hindi literature, music and history. He works as an administrator and is the number seven editor by total contributions. Impressive as this is, you might be surprised... 

Amit from Saharsa wins Rhodes scholarship to Oxford: to work on hydrogen fuel for cars!   Amit, born and brought up in Saharsa, Bihar belongs to a lower middle class family. His father works as a railway employee, and mother is a homemaker. And he has won the Rhodes scholarship to study at the Oxford University.  Amit is currently pursuing his final year in mechanical engineering as part of a five-year integrated programme at IIT-Roorkie depended on funding from various scholarships during his studies. Amit told a reporter ‘My parents weren’t so well educated. We faced financial... 

Nalanda farmer Sumant beats world record in rice production   Patna:  according to reports, five young farmers have set up a new record in paddy cultivation in Nalanda district. State agriculture officials have informed the press that Sumant from Darveshpura under Katrisarai police station has not only set a new record in rice production in the state but also broken the world record. Sumant’s bumper yield of 224 quintals of paddy per hectare exceeds the existing world record of Chinese farm scientist Yuan Longping. Besides Suman, his friends from the same village did not lag behind...