Who came the closest to getting the final seat outcome in Bihar right? Neither a pollster nor journalist nor political pundit, but an economist. In a column in the Indian Express on November 5 Surjit Bhalla gave 175 seats to JDU+ and 60 seats to the NDA. He says he arrived at those figures based on historical analysis,a visit to Bihar and some statistical deductions based on its not being a multi party fight. The visit was undertaken in the company of Prannoy Roy, Shekhar Gupta and others as part of an election time tradition that began in 1998. Those two however did not come up with any such prediction or insight based on the same visit and in fact NDTV's exit poll predicted a BJP win.