Cars, buses, trucks and tractors plied on the road, tossed up to one side, then to the other, like boats sailing on the choppy waters. And, as they jumped to gaping potholes, they left a trail of swirling red dust, for the tar surface had all but vanished. Quite a few of the vehicles apparently lost the fight, as they lay crashed to ditches below.

At night, the district superintendent of police gave me the song of the road. It is actually the story, not of this road alone, not just of Bihar roads in general, but of the State's appalling journey to nowhere.Here is the story in its brief outline. Last August, the Siwan district authorities invited tenders for a Rs8-crore project to repair the road. Strangely, in a state where Government contracts, not industry or agriculture, have created the class of the new rich, none of the known local contractors bid for the contracts.

The fact was the local contractors were afraid of the Siwan MP Sahabuddin of the ruling Rashtriya Janata Dal. ``We'd have to give him sizeable shares of the contract money, as dictated by him, and we were afraid also of the officers who'd demand their shares. That would've left us little margin. So we didn't bid for the contracts,'' explained one contractor on condition of anonymity.

Sahabubbin then allegedly forced the district administration to award the contract to one of his henchmen from Jamshedpur. The first funds were released only last month and, the SP Satyendra Singh said, there was no way the Rs 8-crore work could be completed by March. Much of the money would be spent but much of the road would remain in much the same condition. ``This is no secret I'm divulging to you, not is thestory of one road in Bihar,'' the SP concluded.

He was right, for the roads of Bihar bear tell-tale signs of the corruption that has enmeshed all -- politicians, bureaucrats and criminals -- in a spider's web. But it's a web that suffocates the State's economy but benefits the money-spinning nexus.

Leading the pack was none other than the Road Construction Minister in the last Government (who may yet get plum portfolio) Ilias Hussain whose house was raided by the Income-Tax department last year. He was also the principal accused in the Rs 500-core bitumen scam which is being investigated by the CBI. The roads may not have had much bitumen but its demand and procurement shot up drastically over the past few years.

A CAG report of 1996-97 found out that while the Government's lack of funds forced road construction and repairs fell to as little as 6 per cent in many cases, the bitumen procurement increased between 14 per cent and 93.7 per cent.

Obviously, the bitumen either did not come or was used tomake other things than roads.

The Rs 900-crore fodder scam, on which the CBI forced Laloo Prasad Yadav to serve time in jail, may be the biggest; but in Bihar you have no dearth of scams, the other notable one being the bitumen scam, the one relating to admission to engineering colleges and another called the muster roll scam in rural development schemes.

The last mentioned of the scams was exposed by none other than a former secretary of the Rural Development Department N C Saxena. In a letter to the then chief secretary B P Varma, Saxena regretted that much of Rs 1,177 crore that was available to the state for rural development schemes in 1997-98 had been misused (read, looted). Saxena pointed out the culprits too, ``Right from the BDOs to many district collectors and often some secretaries are busy making money, or collecting money for their political masters, thereby totally distorting priorities which are set on papers.''

What happened to Saxena and his letter, I asked a senior official at Patna.``Nothing,'' came the short answer.