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No one has ever called Patna - the capital of the violent and corrupt Indian state of Bihar - a beautiful city. Nor have its approaches ever been described as picturesque.

As you drive in through the outskirts, the treeless pavements begin to fill with sackcloth shacks. The shacks expand into slums. The slums are surrounded by garbage heaps. Around the garbage heaps goats, pigs, dogs and children compete for scraps of food. The further you go the worse it becomes. Open sewers line the road. In or beside them lie emaciated migrants from famine-hit villages. Sewer rats the size of cats scamper among the rickshaws.

Bihar is one of the last places in the subcontinent which readily conforms to the image of India promoted by well-meaning Oxfam adverts, all beggars, cripples and disease: "send $10 and help Sita regain her sight..." For the reality is that India is now the seventh largest industrial power on earth; and out of a population of 800 million it has a class of 150 million who have incomes higher than that of the average Briton. Today many economists believe that the country will follow Taiwan and South Korea as the next venue for the Pacific Economic Miracle. Western bankers have begun flocking to Bombay; even Sotheby's has moved East.

Yet while Bombay and its hinterland stride forwards towards prosperity, health and full literacy, Bihar has begun to act as a kind of counterweight, visibly dragging the country back towards the Middle Ages. Despite rich mineral deposits and fertile soils, the state remains by far the poorest in South Asia. It has the lowest literacy, the worst roads, the highest crime, the fewest cinema halls. It even has a famine. Whatever index of prosperity and development you choose, Bihar comes triumphantly at the bottom.

Two thousand years ago, it was under a Bo tree near Patna that the Buddha received his Enlightenment; but that was probably the last bit of good news that ever came out of Bihar. Metropolitan Indians today tend to think of Bihar rather as metropolitan Englishmen think of Liverpool - only much more so. Bihar is a social and political basket-case. The mafia, the police and the politicians of the state are virtually interchangeable: Dular Chand Yadav who has 100 cases of dacoity and 50 murder cases pending against him, can also be addressed as Honourable Member for Barh. At least thirty-three of Bihar's State Assembly M.P's have criminal records. Great swathes of countryside are controlled by the private armies of landlords and their rival Maoist militias. The State has withered; Bihar is now nearing a state of pure anarchy.

The state firmly established itself as the horror capital of India in 1980. In Bhagalpur, a provincial town two hundred miles downstream from Patna, the police, frustrated by the corruption of the local judiciary, decided to take things into their own hands. They rounded up 26 suspected criminals and made them lie down in the back of a lorry. Then, one by one, they pierced the men's eyes with a bicycle spoke. After that a man in a white shirt, referred to by the police as 'Doctor Sahib', injected acid into the eyes. One of the blinded men, Saligram Singh, recalls that he was then asked if he could see anything. When he replied 'a little', Doctor Sahib obligingly injected his eyes again.

When Delhi newspapers publish articles on Bihar's disorders and atrocities, they tend to emphasise the state's 'backwardness'. What is needed in Bihar, they say, is development: more roads, more schools, more family planning centres. But as political violence spreads from Patna out into the rest of the country, it seems equally likely that Bihar could be not so much backwards as forwards: a trend setter for the rest of India.

Bihar may be a kind of Heart of Darkness, pumping violence and corruption, pulse after pulse, out into the rest of the Subcontinent. The first ballot rigging recorded in India took place in central Bihar in the 1962 General Election. Thirty years later it is now the norm. Again, the first example of major criminals being awarded Parliamentary seats took place in Bihar in the 1980 Election. Today many senior Ministers from around the country are known mafiosi.

So serious and infectious is the Bihar disease that it is now throwing into doubt the whole notion of an Indian economic miracle. The vital question for India's future is whether the economic prosperity of the West of the country can outweigh the moral slump and economic depression which is spreading out from Bihar and the East. Few doubt that if the 'Bihar effect' - mass corruption, total lawlessness, the breakdown of the institutions of government - does prevail and overcome the positive forces at work in India today then, as one Bihari journalist put it last week: "India will make what's going on in Yugoslavia look like a picnic."

The day I flew into Patna, there were four stories vying for attention on the front page of the Bihar edition of the Hindustan Times; each in its own way seemed to confirm the collapse of government in the state.

The paper led with a report about a group of tribals who were demanding an independent state in the hills of Southern Bihar. The tribals, it seemed, had just carried out a raid on a state owned mine and successfully got away with "almost 600 killogrammes of gelignite, over 1,000 detonators and 1,500 metres of igniting tape."

Below this the paper reported a shoot-out in which the Patna police killed "a notorious criminal wanted in several cases of dacoity including the kidnapping of the Gupta Biscuit Company's proprietor." A political piece carried a statement from the Congress Opposition accusing the Bihar government of "ignoring the famine-like situation prevailing in the state," while another report headlined ‘Crime on the Rise in Muzaffarpur’ detailed the arrest over the previous three months of "1,437 criminals" taken into custody during the 116 riots that the town had apparently suffered since the New Year.

Yet the most astonishing story concerned the goings-on at Patna University. There the previous day angry examinees had "torched a police jeep and damaged the car of the Vice Chancellor." What had caused all this: a cut in student grants? Nothing of the sort. "According to reports, the Vice Chancellor, in a surprise visit to the [exam] centre found all the examinees adopting unfair means. He ordered a body search and seized two gunny bags full of notes, chits and books from the examinees.... in a brazen move the examinees then walked out of the examination hall and resorted to wanton vandalism."

Later, I called on the Vice Chancellor to see if the reports were exaggerated. Professor Mohinuddin was a small wiry man with heavy black glasses. He maintained that, on the contrary, the press had played down the violence. On being caught red-handed the students had attacked him, hurling desks and chairs, and forcing him to take shelter in a sand-bagged police post. There, despite a valiant defence by the six policeman on duty, the mob had succeeded in driving the Vice Chancellor from his refuge with the help of a couple of crude fire bombs. Later, for good measure, the students had issued a death threat against him. "It is lucky I am a widower," said the Professor. "I only have my own safety to worry about."

Not far from Professor Mohinuddin's house was the home of Uttam Sengupta, the editor of the Patna edition of the Times of India. Like his academic neighbour Mr. Sengupta had had an upsetting week. Two days previously, an assassin had taken a potshot at him with a sawn-off shotgun. The pellets had lodged themselves in the back door of his old Fiat. Sengupta had escaped unscathed but shaken.

According to Sengupta, what was happening in Bihar was nothing less than the death of the State. Much of the problem, he said, derived from the fact that the Bihar government was broke and unable to provide the most basic amenities. Patna went unlit at night as there were no light bulbs for the street lamps. In the hospital there were no bed sheets, no drugs, and no bandages. The only X-ray machine in Patna had been out of order for a year; the hospital could not afford to buy the spare parts.

What was bad in Patna was much, much worse in rural areas. Outside the capital, electricity had virtually ceased to be supplied - this despite the fact that Bihari mines produced almost all of India's coal. Without power, industry had been brought to a grinding halt. No roads were being built. There was no functioning system of public transport. In the villages education had virtually packed up and adult literacy was actually declining: since 1981 the number of adults illiterates had risen from 13 to 15 million.

Sengupta maintained that there were two principal effects of this breakdown. Firstly, those who could - the honest, the rich and the able - had migrated elsewhere. Secondly, those who had stayed, had made do. This had involved a sort of unofficial wave of privatisation. As the government no longer provided electricity, healthcare or education, those who could had had to provide it for themselves. Residents in blocks of flats had begun to club together to buy generators. There had been a mushrooming of private coaching institutes and private health clinics.

This privatisation had not just been limited to towns. In rural areas, the richer villagers had begun to build their own roads to link them to the markets. In the absence of state buses there had even been a revival of the use of palanquins. On one road I met four brothers who were returning from carrying a woman to her relatives in a nearby village. They had made their palanquin themselves, they said, and were now bringing in more money from their palanquin business than they were from their fields.

All this was very admirable, but the situation became more sinister when people had taken into their own hands the maintenance of law and order. It was the landlords who were the first to recruit armed gangs, initially to deal with discontented labourers. In response, the poor had fought back, organising themselves into amateur guerrilla groups and arming themselves with guns made by local blacksmiths. Over the years the violence had spiralled: there were now ten major private armies at work in different parts of the state. In many areas the violence had spun right out of control.

One of the worst effected areas was the district to the South of Patna. There, two rival militias were at work: the Savarna Liberation Front (or S.L.F) representing the interests of the high caste landowning Bhumihars, and the Maoist Communist Centre (or M.C.C) representing the untouchables who farmed the Bhumihar's fields. Week after week, the Bhumihars would massacre uppity peasants; then, in retaliation, the peasants would behead an oppressive landlord or two; the police did little to protect either group.

If I wanted to see one possible vision of the future of India, said Uttam, I should visit Barra, the scene of a recent massacre. I took his advice and set off the following morning at dawn. The road, one of the principal highways in Bihar, was the worst I have travelled on in four years of living in India: potholes the size of bomb craters puckered its surface. On either side the rusting skeletons of dead trucks lined the route like a line of memento mori.

As we drove on the twentieth century slipped away. The electricity pylons came to a halt; in the villages, wells replaced such modern luxuries as hand-pumps. Cars and trucks disappeared from the road and eventually even the rusting skeletons vanished. We passed the odd pony trap and the four men with their palanquin. The men flagged us down and warned us about highwaymen. They told us to be off the roads by dark.

Eventually, turning right along a dirt track, we came to Barra, a small but ancient village raised above the surrounding fields by an old tell. I was taken around by Ashlok Singh, one of the two male survivors from the massacre. As we walked he explained, quite matter-of-factly, what had happened. On the night of the 13th of February 1992 two hundred armed untouchables had surrounded the village. By the light of burning splints, the raiders had marched all the men into the fields and tied them up. Then, one after another, they slit the men's throats with rusty harvesting sickles.

Ashlok walked me from the village to an embankment where a small white monument had been erected to the memory of the thirty-eight dead villagers. A hot wind blew in from the fields; dust devils swirled in the dried-out paddy. I asked: "How did you escape?"

"I didn't," he said. And pulling off a scarf, he revealed me the lurid gash left by the sickle, which had sliced off the back of his neck. "They cut me then left me for dead."

Then Ashlok showed me the houses he and the widows of the village had erected with the compensation money. They were miniature castles: tall and square, with no windows except for thin arrow slits on the third storey. Unwittingly, they were almost exact miniature copies of the Peel Towers erected in the Scottish Borders in the later Middle Ages when central authority had completely broken down. There could be no better illustration of Bihar's regression into the Dark Ages.

"The government can no longer protect us," said Ashlok Singh as we walked back to the car. "We are left at the mercy of God."

He rubbed the scar on his neck and said: "Every night after sunset we are frightened."

The driver was itching to be off. It was late afternoon, he said, and he wanted to be back in Patna before sunset. It was madness to be on the roads after dark.

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